Why I Killed My Best Friend (33 page)

In 1970 the artist Gordon Matta Clark bored a hole through a house and Walter De Maria filled a room with dirt; more recently, Rachel Whiteread created a concrete replica of a condemned Victorian house in situ in East London. The young people on the Attic Highway are digging a cylindrical tunnel to connect the shared walls of the houses slated for destruction. In my opinion, it's an important gesture. It reminds us of how much we've lost, and how much more we're willing to lose, in the name of progress, of consumption, of that hotly desired “privacy” that gets packaged and sold as a luxury item, yet actually prevents us from living together, united.

“The street is a place for us to live, eat, talk, sleep,” these young people say. “The street has a history of its own,” people of our generation used to sing at anti-dictatorship protests in the '70s. But who remembers that slogan today? The street has become an abandoned stage-set that we hurry across without the least twinge of emotion, on our way somewhere else, alienated from our own footfalls, from the urgent situation of the present moment. Public squares have become sites for the deafening hubbub of festivals organized by city officials, supposedly “for the people.” But when the festival is spontaneous and improvised, decentralized and unpredictable, then it becomes an annoyance. A danger, even. The images of riot police standing by, of bulldozers lined up face to face with the bonfires of the
young people's jubilant celebration brings to mind moments in this country's past that we simply don't want to relive.

Op-ed column by Gerasimus Pantazis,

Professor of Sociology at Panteion University

The Daily Post

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TRAGEDY ON THE ATTIC HIGHWAY

Thirty-five-year-old mother fights for her life

It was as if there were a war on. Tear gas everywhere, a battle scene. At the height of the clashes on the Attic Highway, at one in the morning, a few policemen fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. One bullet, which seems to have gone astray, ended up in the temple of the unlucky Anna Horn, an artist who played an active role in organizing the demonstrations, and the mother of a six-year-old girl. She was rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Kifisia, where doctors have been struggling to keep her alive. The next twenty-four hours, they say, will be critical. The wounded woman is the wife of successful architect Aristomenis Malouhos, known for his office complexes along Kifisias Avenue, and the daughter of well-known philosopher Stamatis Horn, who lived and worked in Paris during and after the dictatorship.

In the wake of this tragic event, the protestors dispersed. The demolition of the remaining homes will commence tomorrow morning. Apart from the buildings themselves, workers are now faced with the piles of trash left by “environmentalist” protestors, who fought for a better tomorrow with beer cans and paper bags . . .

Bela Psaraki

The Afternoon Post

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A FAREWELL TO ANNA

Who was Anna Horn? An everyday saint whose name was unknown until yesterday? An incurable romantic who fought for a better tomorrow? Over the past few days we've seen her on the news, infinitely repeating the only statement of hers which—to their great luck—television crews had recorded, so that they are now able to give a face to the name of the woman murdered in cold blood by a policeman's bullet. “We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals,” she said. “We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.”

And Anna Horn did in fact fight with her body. Beautiful militant, mother and intellectual, her multifaceted image has already been so thoroughly circulated as to end up a stereotype. Old photographs from her days as an art student in Paris, statements from friends and acquaintances, even some of her father's writings about the anarchist movement in Europe have been deployed. But what lesson can we learn from Anna? What did she leave behind, apart from a young daughter and an adoring husband?

What Anna Horn left behind is a deep distrust of the Greek police, and by extension of the entire state apparatus—a state apparatus that once again reacted to tragedy in a way that can only leave us speechless. A press release by the Minister of Public Order reads, “We must learn from this mistake. It is in our best interest as a nation not to dwell on a single event, but to consider and assess the overall effort.” This “overall effort” apparently refers to the muzzling of thousands of protestors (roughly 2,500 were present on the night of the shooting) who had come to express their anger and bitterness at the way the
state machine is organized, at the passivity of political life. To express, too, their nostalgia for a way of life they are being asked to abandon in order to make way for the forces of progress and prosperity signaled by the grand Olympic building projects.

What else did Anna teach us? That we still have bodies, which we can use as political tools. That an overexposure to mass media achieves precisely the opposite of bodily political action: we watch instead of taking part. That the ideology of the lone revolutionary no longer applies, that there isn't just one form of revolutionary thought. Beneath their kerchiefs, behind their names, the young (and not-so-young) demonstrators on the Attic Highway taught us the postmodern political language of the masses, taught us to accept states of contradiction, taught us that the era of solitary leaders is over. No more tidy marches organized by trade unions, no more dogma, no more replacing of one power structure with another that's even worse. The biggest challenge faced by anti-globalization movements is an internal one: if the reformist left prevails at the expense of these grassroot, anti-establishment trends, then we'll simply continue to breed cosseted unionists with no real impulse to fight the reigning institutional framework of representative “democracy.” In which case every radical attempt at regeneration will fail. All that will remain in a hierarchy of this sort will be the leisurely demonstrations of the middle class (who have money to travel to the places where World Bank summits are held) and the occasional quaint little article in the daily paper . . .

Something else that Anna taught us: that the act of occupying the street at this particular historical moment is the end result of multiple processes—and while rapt art historians and theorists have noted the theatrical value of this act over the past several days, it also has a certain pragmatic value, which lies in the (albeit temporary) disruption of the work crews, and in the difficulties created for the system, if only for a few days.

If we all become romantic troublemakers, Anna Horn won't have to feel alone.

From an op-ed by Despina Arvaniti

The Free Press

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THE REAL REVOLUTIONS OF ANNA HORN

I've known Anna Horn since we were kids. We used to play together during recess. What times those were! Dressed in school uniforms, we swapped hair clips and zodiac crackers. It was 1977. No one could resist the charm of our new classmate who arrived from Paris and spoke to us with such aplomb about the Café de Flore and real butter croissants. Petros Misiakos, today the director of a major software company, wanted to marry her. Maria Papamavrou, whose installations have in the past decade breathed new political life into the art world, was content to live in her shadow. And me? Anna taught me lessons of radical elegance—I begged my mother to buy me tortoiseshell barrettes, which in those days you could only find in major European cities.

The newspapers are calling Anna a great revolutionary, which in my opinion is a distortion of her personality. Anna was a cheerful aesthete who knew how to make you feel she was a rare diamond, even in jeans. Our paths crossed twice in the past year: once at a reception at the prime minister's residence, and once at a charity fashion show. And no, Anna Horn didn't breathe a word about politics. She was a radiant bohemian, looking for a French-speaking governess for her adorable little girl. I'm sure she went to the Attic Highway as enthusiastically as she came to these charity events, moved by her desire to give
back. I'll always remember her as a lively woman who knew how to have fun, who would grab her husband, Aristomenis Malouhos, by the arm, to fight with him side by side in the only real trenches we have left: the trenches we dig in the struggle against gloom and doom.

In this issue you'll find the best of the military look that will dominate the catwalks this winter. My recommendation? Don't give up the fight for the masterful Christian Lacroix backpack. Long live the revolution!

Editor's note, Geli Kotaki

Vogue Greece

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ALONE AT HOME, EATING BLACKBERRIES AND BREAD

Night falls;

it's nice to feel you're missing nothing by staying in

—the river, the mountain, the city that calls to you.

You turn inward, curl up on your inner branch;

outside it's at least as dark as in.

A woman walks through the apartment upstairs,

a man nails something to the wall you share.

Night falls—a little bread to help the berries go down.

Yes, they nail into you, walk over you,

you can trust yourself to strangers' hands.

Door locked, alone, blackberries and black bread.

You eat and are eaten, watch and are watched.

You unfold what you are and take a good look.

Day breaks again, objects harden into shapes.

The tree is a tree, the bread bread, and the berries

small and moldy at the edge of the plate.

The woman left for work,

the man surely has a seascape, now,

in his living room.

Naked and repellant, those inner branches,

and the day calls to you again.

Anna Horn

Paris, April 1981

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ADIDAS CLASSICS

On the way home from my evening walk I passed by your house.

Lights on, windows open

and the sound of your life from the attic room

—a chair being dragged

      
a woman's laugh

      
or perhaps you left the TV on again?

I can live with these things, I'm getting used to your absence.

What I can't bear

are your sneakers outside the door,

worn at the heels, with muddy laces,

placed so neatly side by side

as if your mother were still alive, and pleading:

      
“son, some order, please.”

Your shoes remind me of all we never had—

a house, children, double-bed sheets, the TV playing.

The geography lesson of any couple:

memories to the east, boredom to the west.

Your shoes say,

“He's not yours anymore, accept it.”

I stand in front of your locked door and accept it:

the white, worn leather

      
is the last sign of your existence

at the moment when your body, your airy heart,

your black t-shirt

are journeying from the attic to the sky.

Then, at the corner,

your shoes suddenly disappear,

everything disappears.

As it should.

When you have nothing, you know exactly what it is you want.

Anna Horn

Summer, 1981

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FARMING

Am I scraping at the earth or is it scraping at me?

Am I weeding or is something inside me being uprooted?

Am I tidying hoes and watering cans in the garden shed

or is someone telling me to shut up already and go to sleep?

I have no idea what happens in nature, who does what.

Usually nothing happens.

The earth is silence.

When day breaks, I go back to weeding

flies buzzing over all my actions

in recognition of their significance and difficulty.

I tear open seed packets

to make sure the supplier hasn't tricked me.

In the afternoon I water and listen.

Dampness is silence.

“And if it prefers to dry up?”—I wonder.

“If it got tired and wants to die?”

I'll never know.

Silence is silence.

Anna Horn

Summer, 1984

•

PIZZA NAPOLITANA

for Maria

A large group—how many, twelve?

You're at the far end, in a bad mood,

barely looking my way.

I look when you're not looking, and when you're looking, too.