Presentation of the short film 'Future Suspended' and discussion with Dr Dalakoglou on the effects of financial crisis

Wednesday 11 June / 14:30-15:30
LEONARDO Room, Building 26A (2nd floor)

We would like to invite you to the projection of the 30 minute film "Future Suspended", by the research group of Dr Dimitrios Dalakoglou. Dr Dalakoglou is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Sussex University, which he joined in January 2009 as Lecturer. Before that appointment he was teaching anthropology at UCL for two years. His focus is anthropology of infrastructures and urban public spaces and since 2012 holds an ESRC-Future Research Leaders grant for the project The City at a time of Crisis (crisis-scape.net). For more info please have a look at Dr Dimitris Dalakoglou

The event will start with a projection of the film (30min) and will be followed by short discussion with Dr Dalakoglou.

Short description of the documentary

How does a global financial crisis permeate the spaces of the everyday in a city? This documentary film traces the multiple transformations of crisis-ridden Athenian public space and those who traverse it. In three parts, Future Suspended navigates its way through the past and the present of the crisis as it gets inscribed in Athens dwellers' minds, and as it plays out in their everyday lives. The first section, Privatised, explores the legacy of mass privatisation projects that preceded the 2004 Olympics, placing them in the context of present-day privatisation schemes. Part two, Devalued, examines the ever-shrinking spaces of migrants in the city and the violent devaluation that comes as a result. The final third, Militarised, explains how, at the exact moment when the state recedes from its welfare functions, this devaluation of Athenian lives becomes a generalised condition. Combining geography, anthropology, urban theory and research with visual research methods and digital design, the project has attempted to read the enormous (and often devastating) social and political change playing out before our eyes through the marks it leaves on spaces of the everyday. The rise of racism and xenophobia and the establishment of unprecedented policing are viewed through supposedly prosaic urban sites: the Athenian metro, the city's old and new airports, its highways, squares and streets.