Breathing Exercises in Athens

On the afternoon of September 21, 2018, a young man was brutally beaten to death in plain sight and broad daylight in downtown Athens. For reasons still unclear, he was being chased. He tried to find refuge in a small jewelry shop, but the owner, who claims he thought he was being robbed, locked him in. Together with a neighbor real estate agent, who proved to be high up in a far-right group, and with the occasional participation of other bystanders, they started beating the young man who was panicking but clearly did not pose any threat. Lying on the floor, severely injured by broken window glass, he tried to protect himself while receiving multiple hits on the head. Half unconscious, he received some first aid treatment, then stood on his feet. In a state of shock, he tried to escape holding a piece of broken glass. As soon as the police arrived on site, they immobilized and beat him up even more—despite him lying on the pavement bleeding. They arrested and handcuffed him while unconscious. Unconscious yet handcuffed, the young man was transferred to the hospital by ambulance, where he was pronounced dead.^[1]

Extreme violence came as no surprise. This brutal murder was documented on mobile phones and witnessed by many bystanders, who nevertheless did nothing to stop the brutal beating—with the exception of one man who intervened and one woman who shouted to stop. Some of these witnesses still refuse to appear or testify in court. Although there was plenty of evidence on site, the police made no effort to prosecute anyone other than the unconscious and evidently seriously hurt victim. Instead of being sealed, the crime scene was literally cleaned up by the shop owner who inflicted the assault, yet remained free, as did the other perpetrators. The police’s pretextual effort to investigate the event was equally distressing in the reports of mass media. From the very beginning, the young man was portrayed as a criminal junkie, who intended to rob the store and was probably intoxicated—although there was no evidence to support any such claim. A clear indication of vile discrimination, their racist response was amplified once the victim’s identity came to the fore.

The young man was queer artist and activist Zak (Zacharias) Kostopoulos, aka drag queen Zackie Oh!, a prominent member of the Athenian LGΒTΙQ community. An anti-racist, anti-fascist, HIV-positive queer gay “Dragtivist” and “Proud slut,” who was quite outspoken and very much loved.^[2] His community and family were deeply shocked, but the impact of his killing extended far beyond those who knew him. Public outrage broke out immediately and intensified as video and oral testimonies that had captured the horror surfaced. An official investigation of the incident only came into effect due to public pressure, but in what seemed like a performance of incompetence or cover up. As aptly put by Forensic Architecture’s Christina Varvia, “[h]iding behind incompetence is a political decision to be used when convenient; power relations lurk underneath such excuses.”^[3]

According to the forensic report submitted to court, there is no doubt that Zak Kostopoulos died from heart failure caused by the injuries inflicted on him.^[4] This was a brutal hate crime by male civilians and police, followed by discriminatory media coverage, attempted state and mass media cover up, and all too familiar police impunity.^[5] Zak’s life was treated as a life not worth living to the full. In the words of one of his friends, “they read him as a body that has no value. That no matter how they treated him there would be no consequences—which is what happened—that no one on earth would care about what happened to this body.”^[6]

Yet many did. Zak’s family, kinship and chosen, together with LGBTIQ and feminist community initiatives and individuals, mobilized swiftly and took it upon themselves to highlight the case and excert public pressure for a fair trial.^[7] Zak was a prominent equal rights activist, who was very much appreciated and loved. A writer and artist with a strong sense of humor and active presence in social life and media, he participated in various struggles, creative projects, and drag performances.^[8] According to queer artist Fil Ieropoulos, Zak’s work as a whole had a lasting impact. It established him as “one of the most important political artists of our generation” who remains “a source of inspiration for the queer community.”^[9]

Given the extreme brutality of his killing, the mass responses that emerged in protest did not come as a surprise. In the context of a nation-state where systemic violence is widespread and usually goes unpunished, protests against discrimination and violence have become the new normal.^[10] What was particularly surprising though was that these responses stemmed from all sorts of milieus and were highly differentiated. They ranged from a high-profile, conservative cultural institution engaging in a symbolic act of support, to an anarchist arson attack that targeted the police station to which the officers who beat and arrested Zaκ were assigned.^[11] They also included a large spectrum of creative responses, a phenomenon that is quite unusual in the local context; that is, for a state-violence event to generate so many and diverse creative responses, instead or as a subset of responses that are firmly rooted in the political realm, and remain strictly delimited within it.

One such response that stood out and set the tone was that of the local drag queen/ballroom community. Zackie Oh!’s chosen family countered the attack and its aftermath with all its rage and fabulousness. The very demonstrations they organized and participated in were vibrant political queer art manifestations—including how participants dressed, banners held, slogans, music and singing, dancing and voguing, staged protest actions, graffiti, and stencils. These public performative acts highlighted the aesthetics and politics of drag, making the Athenian LGBTIQ community as a whole more visible and leaving a strong imprint on the city’s political and art scenes.^[12] Recalling the very first demo that they organized, Ieropoulos affirms that it “made Zak’s dream of a political drag art seem more real than ever,” making “it crystal clear on the streets that the war against toxic Greekness must be intersectional and multifaceted.”^[13]

Zak’s killing and what happened after had a lasting impact on the art scene. But how does art retain its relevance when life itself is deprived of any value? This genuine aporia was the main drive for me to look systematically for artistic responses related to Zak’s murder. This curatorial research project revealed material that spans most fields and practices, and remains challenging to process as a whole.^[14] Among other works, I consider FYTA’s opera Orfeas (2020–21)^[15] and Katerina Markoulaki’s experimental short film Pale flowers of Spring (2020),^[16] both dedicated to Zak/Zackie Oh!, as well as Kentaro Kumanomido and Thomas Anthony Owen’s intermedia performance Faster than Light (2018) in which Zak participated. ^[17] In addition, Nova Melancholia’s experimental theater performance Marcel Duchamp (2022)^[18] and Anna Daučíková’s installation Expedition for Four Hands and Accompaniment (2019) at KunstWerke Berlin^[19] incorporated strong references to Zak’s murder and have affinities to drag/queer politics and aesthetics.

In this context, I would like to focus on some works that seem particularly relevant when discussing artistic positions within systems of state violence. Forensic Architecture’s The Killing of Zak Kostopoulos (2019) is probably the most well-known example.^[20] It is an investigation informed by the methodologies and aesthetics of what Forensic Architecture define as counter-forensics, “a civil practice that aims to interrogate the built environment to uncover political violence undertaken by states.”^[21] The project was commissioned by the Kostopoulos family, who recruited the UK-based agency to conduct an inquiry into the case for the trial, following the investigation they conducted into Pavlos Fyssas, the antifascist musician who was murdered in Athens by members of the criminal neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn in 2013.^[22]

The group traced and scrutinized all available audiovisual footage to establish the actual sequence of events. Published in 2019 as a report comprising text, video, photos and 3D reconstructions of the scene, the investigation unveiled crucial evidence related to the killing and exposed the police as not having conducted a proper investigation, especially with regards to a key witness who appears to play a central role in the unfolding of events.^[23]

This is Right: Zak, Life and After (2020) is a dense short nine-minute film by the Athens based feminist visual artist Gevi Dimitrakopoulou, produced in collaboration with queer filmmaker Vassiliki Lazaridou.^[24] A portrait of Zak based on perspectives of members of his community, through personal accounts of the event and the aftermath of his murder, the film juxtaposes archival material with Zak/Zackie Oh!, sound recordings and documentary footage from demonstrations, personal accounts, queer and drag performances, and staged footage.

Dimitrakopoulou’s film reconstructs and renegotiates the event through a critical queer lens. It captures the grief and rage within Zak’s community, and throughout celebrates radical drag culture—from the burning of the Greek flag at the very beginning of the film to the popular slogan “This is right! Kick with 12-inch heels to put your heads together,” which sounds at the end and inspired the film’s title.^[25].

A slightly different approach is taken by the Athens- and Berlin-based artist Vera Chotzoglou. Her work Rausch (2018) has been presented as an installation with photos, text, and a homonymous film, which can also function autonomously.^[26] It presents fragments of underground queer rave culture and daily personal encounters, rendering feasts and bodies visible without exposing them. According to Chotzoglou, “Rausch is the narration of a night, or many nights, a celebration, the observation of a queer Dionysian state. […] The individual limits fade away; the subjects lose their outlines and their privacy; they cling to a dissimilarity that lacks a specific shape.”^[27] The video ends with raw footage of Zackie Oh! performing and is dedicated to her memory. Any of the “protagonists” could be Zackie, and any of them could find themselves in her place. Chotzoglou celebrates queer performativity and aesthetics as much as she affirms the collective desire to reclaim safe spaces and foster cultures of acceptance.

Sofia Rozaki’s painting glitter in our wounds (2018) was created in the immediate aftermath of the murder.^[28] The work is accompanied by a poem written by the artist:

There’s not enough time in the world for these wounds to heal
but beware
there’s something your father
forgot to mention,
conveniently enough,
so pay close attention
these tears
you keep mistaking for a sign of weakness
one day
will fall like acid rain on your skin.

Striking a fragile balance, Rozaki conveys the scene of Zak’s murder with childlike honesty and cynical cruelty. His black shoe, left lying on the pavement after the attack, draws a magical barrier between his body and the dehumanized crowd. Red tears drop like acid rain, pink triangles attack the attackers and their accomplices. The artist activates her queer glitch aesthetic to restitute a “life unworthy of life” in Nazi semiology and terminology, the phrase (lebensunwertes Leben) used to designate individuals identified as deviants or agitators, deemed redundant and therefore to be annihilated.^[29] Initially conceived as a badge of shame for gays in Nazi Germany concentration camps, similar to the yellow star for Jews or the red triangle for communists, the pink triangle has since become reclaimed as an emblem of resistance and resilience.^[30] Rozaki engages with this tradition and transforms rage into a queer narrative that rises up against fascist brutality.

All these works bear obvious differences, yet it is their similarities that struck me as most interesting. They all stem from and deal with a process of mourning, highlighting the constitutive importance of trauma and loss. In doing so, they affirm Judith Butler’s call “to think about loss as constituting social, political, and aesthetic relations, thereby overcoming the conventional understanding that ‘loss’ belongs to a purely psychological or psychoanalytic discourse.”^[31] In the same direction, they offer ways to overcome a series of paradoxes linked to mourning, which Butler also brilliantly captures when she argues that “loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression.”^[32]

In this sense, works as diverse as Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the killing and Sofia Rozaki’s queer glitch depiction of the scene seem to converge. Their textured and multilayered accounts of loss and violence correlate mourning, with its dominant causes and articulations, partaking in the act, language, and knowledge production process that is as affective and vulnerable as it is militant and empowering. They transcend the purely symbolic realm to resist dominant narrative and to restitute “a body that matters” within the agonistic fields of contemporary art and culture in the broadest sense, as fields that overlap with and partake in politics.^[33]

These rearticulations of the event give it more visibility without spectacularizing it, and they are very conscious of the politics involved in their tactics. As Forensic Architecture’s Stefanos Levidis explains, “[o]ne needs to be aware at all times […] of the politics produced by their representational attempts. […] our work often treads a delicate balance between visibility and obscurity, but also opacity.”^[34] This fragile balance also transcends the films by Chotzoglou and Dimitrakopoulou, which partake in the enabling potential of queer-feminist art making. In rendering visible expressions of sexuality and gender fluidity as personal and political acts, they engage with representation as a critical tool of queer politics.^[35]

Another point of convergence is how these artworks address, engage with, and empower the individuals and communities that are affected by systemic state violence. According to Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, “[e]ach of our investigations brings together communities that suffer the violence directly, activists on the ground, scattered researchers and experts, artists that can arrange things in an original way, and cultural institutions that can amplify the results.”^[36] Engagement through activation, collaboration, address, and with the consent of those involved. A crucial element of queer grassroots politics is of utmost importance, and, in the words of artist and activist Maria Dolores (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) “[p]racticing a culture of consent in all its multiplicity […] constitutes an affirmative act of political agency that empowers us to confront the silencing structures of death politics.”^[37]

Growing from community ties and materializing through personal networks, these positions resist notions of artistic production as an individualistic practice and commodity. They move away from a single perspective towards a shared one, and forge aesthetic and social alliances that expose, critique, and look beyond systemic state violence. In doing so, they take part in “a public queer feminist mourning […] on our own terms,” which function similarly to breathing exercises.^[38] Maybe, following Sara Ahmed’s syllogism, giving some form to aspirational hopes for a better life:

We need to think more about the relationship between the queer struggle for a bearable life and aspirational hopes for a good life. Maybe the point is that it is hard to struggle without aspirations, and aspirations are hard to have without giving them some form. We could remember that the Latin root of the word aspiration means “to breathe.” I think the struggle for a bearable life is the struggle for queers to have space to breathe. […] With breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility.^[39]

Thanks to Vera Chotzoglou, Gevi Dimitrakopoulou, Forensic Architecture, Katerina Markoulaki, Sofia Rozaki, Giorgos Papaconstantinou, and Gregoris Gougousis for sharing material. Heartfelt thanks to Nasia Drimousi, Christos Fousekis, Evgenia Fragkolia, Teiko Ito, and Sofia Rozaki for providing feedback.