Visual Regimes of Mobility Photographic Exhibitions on Refugees during the Financial Crisis in Greece

Abstract

This article explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. It also examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis. I argue that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.

Constructing Selves in (Im)mobility: Greek Women’s Narratives Concerning the COVID-19 Lockdowns in Athens, Greece

“…Perceiving cleaning and wearing a mask as emasculating, pacifying practices, as men did (see also Glick 2020), they conceived the negation to disinfect and wear a mask as "resistance" to the hegemonic model of hygiene COVID-19 rules as described by scientists and the government. By doing this, they confirmed "resistance" as a dominant, gendered, motif of organizing action in Greek society especially in periods of "crisis" (for a discussion of different forms of resistance during the Greek financial and refugees' crises see Kalantzis 2016;Theodossopoulos 2014;Topali, 2020). However, most women ritually controlled the incorporation of "strangers" (objects, bodies) into the house making them stop, disinfect/get masked and then become acceptable.…”