‘We want bread, education and freedom’

An ethnographic snapshot of Athens on 17 November

Abstract

‘We want bread, education and freedom’ is an ethnographic experiment that traces and weaves together the unfolding of multiple crises in Greece in the mid-2010s. An ethnographically informed snapshot of a visit to the squatted hotel City Plaza in Athens, the piece unfolds by exploring the polysemy and versatility of the 1973 slogan ‘Bread, education, freedom’ and how it has been reappropriated and re-signified over time to make sense of the 2010 economic crisis and later, of the so-called refugee crisis. While the text pulls together historical events, political discourses and personal reflections, the graphics capture the Hotel City Plaza’s dense affects and lay bare those tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences that are often hard to verbalise and make sense of. Altogether this piece configures an unfished, raw and sensorial journey through the struggles of reconciling political belonging, positionality and intellectual commitment to anthropology.