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Is Athens Burning? Ask The Graffiti Artists

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While much of graffiti is mindless spray-painting and egotistical self-aggrandizing tagging, some Greek street artists are using their talents to paint murals of dissent against the country’s crushing economic crisis and the people they blame, usually politicians, bankers and the police.
The New York Times noted the growing use by graffiti artists in Greece’s cities of blank malls and grimy, concrete buildings and the sides of structures in empty lots and on main streets as a raw message of protest, “the latest in a wave of socially and politically conscious artwork spreading over the walls of Athens.”
“People in Greece are under increasing pressure,” said iNO, a soft-spoken man who told the Times he wants to draw attention to the social situation in this crisis-hit country, especially for the young, who are enduring a jobless rate north of 60 percent.
“They feel the need to act, resist and express themselves,” he said, and the frequent targets are the people and institutions blamed for a crisis that has a record unemployment rate and deep poverty, while politicians and the rich remain unscathed and have prospered in many cases.
Graffiti is as ancient as the Acropolis in Greece but in the past five years the polarization of society has given birth to a new angry urgency of wall artists who are more than spray scribblers and whose works now many buildings with expressions of outrage and irony, making Athens what the Times called a Mecca of graffiti in Europe.
Ironically, it comes at a time when Athens’ Mayor George Kaminis said he wants to get graffiti off the walls, although he didn’t say if that will extend to more extravagant works that are as much art as vandalism.
“If you want to learn about a city, look at its walls,” said iNO, who used to spray graffiti on trains but recently started using buildings as a canvas for murals with a social message. “Take a walk in the center of Athens, and you will get it.”
The outrage has even drawn people who weren’t previously graffiti painters, such as a dentist who uses spray paint and stencils to put acts of anarchy on the walls, directing his fury at government officials and police.
“The middle class and the working class in Greece have been ruined,” said the dentist, who goes by the street handle Mapet, declining to give his real name. “My goal is to deliver social and political counterpropaganda, and make people think.”
Much of the work is in the gritty neighborhood of Exarchia, an anarchist stronghold where even a police station came under attack a few years ago and where the hooded Lanti-establishment rebels keep out drug dealers and crime.
But the work is spreading to other working-class areas where people had routinely submitted to whatever fate they were dealt, and a number of them are stepping out and stepping up to express their feelings on the walls.
It began to show its face after the two-week riots in December of 2008 following the killing of a 15-year-old student shot by police during a confrontation that set the city on fire.
Graffiti in Greece has expanded past just slogans such as “Their Wealth is Our Blood,” on the walls to full-fledged Leonardo Da Vinci-sized whole building pieces, frequently aimed at the authorities.
“Make no mistake: graffiti is a weapon of influence because it’s so apparent in the city,” Charitonas Tsamantakis, a graffiti artist who is publishing a book, Hellenic Graffiti History, told the Times. “The authorities want to embrace it so they can neutralize it and control it. It’s a way of breaking our spirit.”

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