ABSTRACT
The cemetery space allocated to the individual dead is temporary, like a rented home or a hotel room, and subjected to spatial and temporal restrictions — restrictions that have intensified in the era of austerity. The public space of Athens has suffered multiple violent assaults by anti-austerity protestors, police, and terrorists. Greece’s entrance into the European community brought about paradigmatic changes in the urban landscape, its image and everyday use. The museumification of democracy turns Athens into a cemetery of classical Greece: a fossilized exilic legacy of contemporary Europe. The social need to create memory spaces, to protect domestic history, the inside, becomes evident in increasing deprivatizing, profanatory gestures like graffiti, selfies, and the street memorials, the flexible little graves. The little grave assemblages reveal the emergence of new forms of anamnesis; forms that are disjunctive with the formalized archaicization of memory promoted by the historical monument, the museum or the archaeological site.
