This inquiry focuses on lethal censorships and particularly on cases of political murders of artists. It attempts to synthesize the picture of afterwards created through memories, narrations and even research material, posing questions such as: How does political loss produce temporalities of memory and mnemonic performance? How do mnemonic and emotional communities, expressing grief in public, make resistance performances feasible? And more specifically, what concerns and what needs arise in art from lethal acts of censorship? How are public space and public discourse permeated by the deceased/dead and its phantasmal depictions? Furthermore, what are the consequences of these incidents in the practices of the use of public space by artists with relation to the conception, exhibition or even production of their work?

Dealing with the political loss from the position of the visual artist/photographer/researcher and in order to trace and visualize the political phantasma in agora, I combine this exploration with artistic performance attempting to associate social theory with art and expose the intricate field of interrelations between aesthetics and politics. Hence, I shall conceptually approach the murders of artists as phantasma-agoric events of political grief and resistance which are and will always be ongoing, elaborating further on questions I examined also in my doctoral thesis. [1]

Antifascist Concert, Lipasmata Drapetsona, 17.09.19 © Maria Paschalidou 2019

Protest, Keratsini, 18.09.19 © Maria Paschalidou 2019

*** This postdoctoral research was co-funded by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Program "Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning", in the framework of the "Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers – 2nd circle” (MIS-5033021) act implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece (IKY). 

This research was developed in collaboration with the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences under the supervision of Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology, Culture Theory and Gender Studies.
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[1] Maria Paschalidou, “Phantasm-agoria of/in crisis. Lens-Based Media and collective experience of the political in performing ‘image’ and agora”. De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, 2018. My doctoral research was completed with the creation of seven different projects, which critically involve phantasmagoria as a complex synthesis of the notions ‘image’/phantasma and agora, and renegotiate the practice of participation connecting the political with poetic language and visuality: Arbitrariness (2012), Symposium (2012), Biography of the Bread (2014), Semiotics of the Phantasma (2014), Semiotics of the Protest (2014), Shining on Traces of Escape (2015), The Bankorgs (2015).