+ A Kerameikos Roadside Picnic ₂₀₁₆

In collaboration with Jason Macarlino, Reinette Roux and Lauren Fane

This project was undertaken over the summer of 2015-16 as an overseas design studio in Athens co-ordinated by Professor Nigel Westbrook and Kalliope Kontozoglou, with special guests Elia Zenghelis and Eleni Gigantes.

This studio brief focussed on three squares that define the historical triangle in the centre of Athens: Syntagma, Omonia and Kerameikos. Each square is characterised as a marketplace embodying differing types of theatricality. Omonia, the ‘flesh market, Syntagma, ‘the marketplace of ideas’ and Kerameikos ‘the market of entertainment.’ The studio was invited to examine these spaces with a fresh view. How do we perceive public space nowadays in the increasingly privatized built environment?

“A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music…the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.”[1]

We were given the site at Kerameikos. Referred to as ‘the square that never was,’ Kerameikos is a large public void set between the historical location of Philopappos Hill and an emerging entertainment district that has begun to infiltrate the old gas work precinct of Gazi to its north.

Site investigations revealed a series of fragmentary urban narratives, each of which interacted with our site yet left no permanent traces of their unique character. These narratives seemed to dissipate upon crossing Piraeus road, coming out of Kerameikos cemetery or exiting the Gazi gasworks.

We identified this as the cause of the site’s negation, and sought to collect a series of fragments from each of the urban scenarios we had experienced on our paths to the site. This was a process of mapping that aimed to visually represent and survey, through imagery - both found and created, our experiences of these fragmentary narratives. We proposed a visual encyclopaedia that, when separate, highlights the indifferent nature of this site as a void. When compiled however, this encyclopaedia offered a new way of considering these oppositions as a series of juxtapositions, able to generate new meaning, situations and modes of synthesising these stories. Turning the page is uncovering, excavating and creating new possibilities for a site that remains only a transitional zone.

Each of these fragmented narratives emerge incoherently at the site at Kerameikos which is witness to these oppositions; the everyday, the ancient, the dissipating and the emergent, life and death. Each of which hold value for the inscription of a public identity for the site. The proposal should embrace each urban experience and identify their separate characteristics.

Our proposal at Kerameikos suggests a series of gateways that express these experiences. Firstly we propose everyday function to be re-instated along the train line, with housing and mixed commercial market spaces below. These functions open onto a tiered park land that stitches the neighbourhood around Philopappos with the site of the ancient cemetery. Here we intend to excavate the everyday and place it next to the ancient. The tourist, who comes to observe the sacred sites, is provided with a linear information centre in the form of a museum bridge. This bridge not only negotiates the drastic level changes across the site, but also provides historical interpretation, holding not only physical artefacts but communicative devices in the form of interactive media.

A second passage is proposed for Piraeus Road. The vehicular tunnel serves not only as a pedestrianising device but also as an urban landmark and information spectacle; advertising, dates, weather, news, hotel deals, upcoming events, political propaganda, farmer’s strikes, fugitives on the run. Passing underneath the tunnel is the new ‘square’, taking its form from the Telesterion that once existed at Eleusis. The square is a threshold that signifies a transitional moment. This was the point of initiation for those readying themselves for the ceremonial experiences of the Eleusian Mysteries.

Reinterpreted here in our Roadside Picnic, the ‘pilgrim’ (both tourist and local) has the option of remaining above ground traversing a series of parks towards the re-connected botanical gardens, or beginning a descent into a world below Gazi, where we choose to augment the Eros and those impassioned activities that currently exist in Gazi’s nightlife scene. We embrace this program because like the stark juxtaposition of commercial highway and ancient relic, these activities generate spectacular juxtapositions of time and memory.

[1] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic: Tale of the Troika (Best of Soviet Science Fiction), trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 107.