Archives of border crossing: Crafting emotional proximity and distance on the walls of Athens

Abstract

This article explores the political messaging present on the walls and street furniture of the city of Athens in the context of displacement, border crossing and asylum seeking. It engages with photographs of graffiti, posters, and stencils, taken by the authors between 2017 and 2022, to demonstrate how ‘banal’ artefacts tell stories of the changing relationship between the city and seekers of sanctuary. We examine what roles graffiti might play in creating and supporting emotional proximity between groups of city dwellers, whose paths might not necessarily cross. Taking inspiration from Tazzioli’s notion of the ‘ethnography of vanishing spaces’ (Tazzioli 2020: 150) the article maps the memories and histories of transient lives in Athens and how changing political responses and narratives can be read on its walls.