ABSTRACT
This chapter critically reflects on the filmic representation of Agios Panteleimon (Saint Panteleimon) Square, a contested public space in Athens, Greece, and its role in the production of far-right propaganda. It departs from Paul Virilio’s formulation of the urban experience as mediated by technology and shaped by the acceleration of speed and operates at the intersection of Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” and Rosi Braidotti’s “Nomadic Subjects,” to explore how digital infrastructure, in the form of screens and mobile cameras, interacts with some of the traditional elements of urban space and produces new readings of it. The chapter examines five amateur YouTube videos filmed between 2008 and 2017 and associated with Golden Dawn, a long-standing neo-Nazi political party which grew in popularity during the years of the financial crisis during 2010–2015 in Greece. It unravels the multiple, divergent and contradictory representations of crisis Athens, the situated perspectives that emerge from them, and, by their very exclusion, the space of the ‘other’ in the city. Ultimately, it examines how particular place-symbols in the square have contributed to the staging of mediated spectacles and, consequently, to the construction of unsituated claims for ‘Greekness’ and ‘pureness.’
