Ανασκαφές Φωτός στην ΑθήναLight excavations in Athens

The city has a body. An image covers it. Beneath the body of the image lies another body. It cannot be seen. It breathes through the ephemeral, through rusted convictions, through half-collapsed façades.

Athens does not exist. Where it does not exist, it sets its own stage.

Out of focus, unedited, without.

The Slam Dinners Poetry Club takes to the streets.

We do not know exactly what it is looking for.

Perhaps what remains when a human being stops explaining. A gesture, a glance, a shadow waiting to leave.

The city does not offer itself to you out of kindness. It lets you find it only after you have passed through your own pain.

Only then does it offer you words.

Giovana takes them and puts them in a bag full of hopes.

In the poor neighbourhoods, there is a truth that has not yet had time to put itself in order. Unmade buildings lie in the city’s bed. Life opens its mouth to tell a story to the clouds, unaware that someone is watching.

Mitsi holds a camera. The subconscious could become a documentary, she thinks.

Rania stops before a light and stirs it; a circle takes shape. Achilles remembers a phrase: “Somewhere, we have met before,” he tells her.

It is not poetry yet. It is concrete, stones, materials.

Whatever remains from the encounter may become the foundation of a poem.

Or perhaps not.

Katerina records the plural with her post-eye. “But this cannot be named,” says Efthymis. A pencil is needed.

Angeliki abandons the rooms. Steps out of the screens. She leaves the loneliness of a question to stand on its own. Maria tries to exist somewhere between the instant and a pulsating note.

“The world is not looking for resemblance!” she says.

Every walk is a small excavation into the etymology of light.

Sissy brings a shovel each time, to dig a cave out of meaning.

We dig with our footsteps. With our silences. With the images we hold on to for a few seconds.

“We are afraid that if we look at them for too long, they will disappear!” says Poppi.

We collect the light of streets, of the depersonalised, of the wondrous, of poor miracles. The light of a particular hour finds Afroditi in an empty shop window. The mannequins are not there.

They are missing, out for a walk.

Light falls upon a human being and, for a moment, makes them belong somewhere.

We always return to bars. Words drink, and their mouths open.

It is not we who speak. No.

Words are our voices. Our voices are music. Some write it down, some film it, some listen. Someone thinks they are recording it. But words are extras in the central idea of the world. The arts, fragments of alcohol, no longer stand opposite one another. They stagger around the same table.

This is poetry.

At last!

There is a God.

They call it a microphone, and it has come to hear every confession.

“In the end, there will be—” says Akis, “there will be a work.” A composition of gazes, sounds, fragments of life. “Not simply a record of a city,” says Alex, “but a memory made together with it.”

Perhaps this is what we are looking for. To return to the street and no longer be the same people who walked it. To uncover the human being, just a little, from beneath the image. To wash a little of the lost meaning from words.

To pass, almost imperceptibly, from the once-I to the now-we.

There is a ferocious we that will overcome the loneliness of the world.

Athens does not end.

It begins somewhere else, somewhere there, where you pause and look.

Somewhere a group of people, coming from different starting points and different quests, tries to shed light on the darkness of the word friendship.