Intro

What is Athenscope?

Athenscope consists of three maps, each depicting a different, imaginary path taken by the history of the city and recording the changes a particular historical shift would entail for the planning, size and structure of the cityscape.

The first map (Athens A) places the historical change around 300 AD and supposes that Athens was chosen to be the capital the Eastern Roman Empire, so becoming a metropolis with a continuous presence in the western world. The second map (Athens B)supposes that Athens was never made the capital of the new state that merged out of the Greek revolution and retained its regional characteristics.

Finally the third map (Athens C) records Athens as it would have been had the Left won the Greek Civil War, following the model of "actual" Athens, through with an enhanced socialist spirit. Athenscope seems to be a playful concept somewhere between Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and an unhistorical fantasy that sees reality as an accumulation of variable contingencies. on a second level, however it utilizes the tools of historical mapping to underline today's collective identifications, the real city, its inhabitants and their obsessions. This project creates a retrospective utopia which is not the ghost of a future based on an improved version of the present, but rather a fantastic archaeological find recording the ghost of a parallel present

Nefeli Gianakopoulou (from the Athens Biennial catalog)

The artist standing between the three space boxes Athenscope is presented in (each box one city)