RETIRE
Installation
2023—2024
Retire project aims to explore the wild change of property and space in the city of Athens that has been taking place during the last years. The word ‘retire’ apart of referring to the top floors of the typical polykatoikia building, is an architectural term that describes the horizontal withdrawal of the volume of the building, creating escalated balconies in order to allow the sun to enter inside the lower floors of the building across.
Resulting from an economical model based on exchange called ‘antiparochi’, the class arrangement of the polykatoikia has been moving down from the privilege top floors to the basements, with wealthy/middle class Greeks living on the top (retire), middle class people in the middle floors and lower income people and migrants living in the lower floors and the basement.
Nowadays the class arrangement of the whole city changes as the top floors are being sold to foreign and wealthy buyers that either buy for the golden visas or for investment. As the Greek flags will keep on moving down from the balconies of the ‘retire’ to the lower floors of the polykatoikia, the project ‘Retire’ aims to document through various media this very moment of change of space and power structure in the city.