Radical Communications: Rebellious Expressions on Urban Walls

(Hardback)

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Radical Communications explores unauthorized messages we see in the cities we live in and their impact on the construction of social reality. Michael Tsangaris treats the city as a text and examines the political slogans, graffiti, and street art of Athens as complex visual signs in an alternative communication system. He argues that the legitimacy, aesthetic value, and social acceptability of these expressions depend on the time, place, and social group or individual that interprets them. Finally, his analysis reveals the contradictory character of the contemporary city. It shows a city of social inequalities, cultural diversity, multinational encounters; of conflicts between age groups and political, economic, and epidemic crises; a city of one-dimensional thinking, apathy, and consumer fetishism but also a city that aspires to the dream of a better society and holds utopian promise.

Reviews

Tsangaris uses Athens as his canvas, focusing on unauthorized urban graphics, which in recent decades have emerged as a major medium of aesthetic intervention and social protest in Athenian cityscape. But do not let yourself be fooled by his aesthetic analysis and the images of graffiti. This is a deeply political book. Using the Greek capital as a case-study, the writer discusses the urban space we are losing and the urban space we are reclaiming. This is a political debate that takes place every day, in artistic terms, within all our cities.

Author Bio

Michael Tsangaris is senior teaching fellow at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus in Greece.