[UN]FINISHED
How many pages is an [UN]FINISHED book?
- LocationAthens, Greece
- ProjectBook
- Size19.5 x 27.5 cm, 288 pages
- Year2023
- CollaboratorsJap Sam Books, The J.F. Costopoulos Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation
The concrete frames of buildings punctuating the urban landscape of Athens is the focus of the research by artist and director Maria Lalou and the OP-partner Skafte Aymo-Boot, which resulted in the book [Un]finished.
Through images, stories and essays, the book recounts the course of these concrete dinosaurs. It is a photographic atlas of buildings, Which are sight abhorrent and unsightly at first sight. But which, when organised under an umbrella of cultural geography and anthropological sociology, turn into interesting fields of reflection.
Working methodically as archaeologists of the city, Lalou and Aymo-Boot mapped and photographed these buildings in all seven geographical districts of Athens to a body of narratives illuminating some of the haunting stories of these concrete frames.
“This book is the culmination of our effort to highlight the undervalued phenomenon of concrete skeletons observed in the Athenian urban landscape, instead of chronicling an unseen history of modern Athens”
With this book Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot present the phenomenon of a particular pending architecture mutely present all over Athens. The abandoned polykatoika – multi storey apartment buildings – are emblematic of the development of modern Greece throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The book deals with the politics of urban space by treating the unfinished buildings as study objects and tracing their individual histories. Throughout the words of current owners and by means of photographs, archival documents and found artifacts a different chronicle of the development of modern Athens is taking shape. Essays by Brooke Holmes, Platon Issaias and Elpida Karaba critically touch upon the phenomenon from different perspectives. Moving in scale from a tactile portrait of one specific concrete structure to a complex building index, the atlas introduces a method for extracting forgotten memories and hidden structures, suggesting an alternative reading of the city.
