Sites of Collective Resistance

This work is concerned with the production of social space through cultural and performance practices; it proposes the collective production of space as a mode of resistance and examines performance manifestations, occupations and constructions within the contemporary neoliberal landscape. The thesis seeks to develop a mode of critical engagement with the spatial – its constraints and potentialities – moving from performance manifestations to emergent cultural spaces reclaiming the city.
Setting its horizon in the cultural landscape of Athens before and throughout the ongoing economic crisis, this research explores divisions between the private and the public, performance practices and political interventions and examines how space is produced and organized within specific spatial reclamations. Moving across urban policies, site-specific interventions, performance and political manifestations, this thesis draws on interdisciplinary methodologies in order to examine the potential of cultural/performance practices to constitute critical counter-hegemonic sites and spheres of co-existence.

Supervision: Prof. Adrian Heathfield and Prof. Joe Kelleher