Figuring crisis

This essay contributes to the growing body of research on crisis-related street art in Athens by focusing specifically on the political potential of artworks that posit the human figure as the central device of expression. Through the work of the artists One Yuro and EX!T I argue that figurative street art stages a powerful response to the biopolitics and affective regime of the crisis by rendering visible and sensible the embodied effects of precarity that it bestows upon the subject. In fostering a dynamic interplay between the body of the city, the bodies on the streets, and the bodies on the walls, these artworks claim the urban landscape of Athens as a space for collectively processing and addressing the prolonged state of exception, in turn offering a symbolic point of departure for reimagining the crisis city as a site from which collective forms of solidarity and resistance may emerge. Departing from fetishizing notions of crisis creativity, they form part of a broader ecology of resistance that is sustained by a relationship to the social world of crisis that is poetic and performative rather than mimetic and representational, weaving a sense of political potentiality into the very fabric of everyday life.