Interview by Gary Cansell.

Iain

Three days, exploring the city and its satellite Olympic parks and stadia, in January 2010, when strikers and students are beginning to take to the streets. And the extent of the economic catastrophe is being felt. ‘All for the best in the best of all worlds,’ say the Greeks. ‘As long as we stick together.’

DOGS

They were going to hunt dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. A fertile myth – and the starting point for an essay, which is due to appear in The London Review of Books. Dogs everywhere. Unculled, collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: cleaned-up, neutered, turned loose. Tagged with blue collars. On film footage, shot two years after the 2004 Games, I noticed the loping beasts, freelance caretakers, patrolling the overgrown wilderness of the Olympic complex, out at Maroussi. Those who are condemned without justification become the sole occupiers of the deserted palace.

THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI

An undervalued travel journal by Henry Miller, time out, between Paris and an American return: in the shadow of war. The first Miller title published by Penguin Books (1950), after original publication in 1941. Miller mythologizes the Falstaffian poet, George Katsimbalis. A war-damaged man, ever-thirsty, indulging epic flights of fancy. With all the madness of a grand project promoter.

He was talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannizing the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London, say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself… Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai. It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no let up to it. The walls were papered with the plans of new cities… It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage.

GIORGIO de CHIRICO

Dreamer of ruins. Lived in Athens as young man. Attended the Polytechnic. Was present at the first Olympic Games of the modern era in 1896. The currant trade had collapsed, the country was bankrupt. De Chirico scorned the attempt at staging a parallel cultural Olympiad.

Dreary, tedious and above all artificial. A destructive atmosphere of intellectualism lay over the public and the actors. It looked as though everyone was stifling huge yawns… But the organisers of open-air spectacles do not want to understand and continue, more through stupidity than through obstinacy or conviction, to give these clumsy performances in all countries.

NEW AIRPORT

Familiar sheds: IKEA as a complimentary flightpath hangar in yellow and blue. Whisky hoardings for Johnnie Walker in terminal corridors and Metro station. HOPE WALKS FASTER THAN FEAR. THERE’S A GREAT BIG WORLD OUT THERE – & IT’S ALL YOURS.

OLD AIRPORT

Abandoned. Serviced by a padlocked bridge. Expensive sheds, ghosts of trade fairs and expositions, waiting for retail park funding. I am arrested, driven away, for wandering the site taking photographs. Unlike the paranoia of the Lower Lea Valley, nobody cares about the images. I’m dumped back on the main road.

GRAFFITI

Universal underclass babble. Not an audition for gallery space and alternative celebrity status. Football, music, Mao. Stencilled Uncle Sam: I WANT YOU TO PAY. Finger jabbing like Quentino Tarantino on his whisky billboard: I WRITE MY OWN SCRIPT. Trains, by unspoken agreement, are only sprayed up to window level.

MARKUPOLO STADIUM

A post-Olympic use has been found for one of the stadiums. Australians run a limited-over cricket league.

LEGACY EXERCISE

No Greeks sweat around the splendid new path at the base of the Acropolis rock. A few Coca-Cola executives and more Aussies come out in the dusk. When my niece gives the circuit a try, she is bitten by one of the guardian dogs.

NOSTALGIA

When we are thrown off the Metro, heading out for the Olympic Complex, we are decanted into a bendy bus, a viral torpedo, going nowhere very slowly, which makes us feel very much at home.

ARISTOTELIS (film-maker) INTERVIEW. London: 4/2/10

‘I grew up in Athens. Like most of the people who live there, I am not from Athens. I had a happy life. I lived in the suburbs. I studied architecture at the University of Athens. I was living near the centre, Omonia Square, part of the historic triangle of Athens. Omonia Square is a place where crime has increased. Prostitution: drugs: it’s an interesting place.’

‘The riots were not something new, this was happening for many years before… The riots started with one incident, the death of a young

student. Then everything broke loose. The sad thing is that nothing happened after that event. And now Greece is in a worse economic state. With the change of government almost everyone is in a bad situation and it’s a hard place to be and to work. The structure of society, based on family, based on friends, is what keeps us going: everyone helps one another. It’s not like England, where everyone is an individual.’

‘The Olympic Games were a great thing to have for historic reasons, but the Games were not well handled… Now the legacy of the Games is just empty buildings, we have no use for them. They are monuments for us, historic monuments, so we can handle them and live with them. We are used to living next to ruins. They are just ruins, they were never anything else. ‘

‘Yes, definitely, the Olympic project contributed to the situation we are in now. We have an increased debt. It’s the attitude Greek people have towards things. “It’s fine, it will get better – as long as we’re together, having fun. It will work out.” That’s history.’

MELINA MERCOURI

Movie diva, government minister. Mercouri invents the notion of a ‘City of Culture’. ‘Culture,’ she pronounced, ‘is Greece’s heavy industry.’

There is a clip of Mercouri on YouTube, like a superimposition of Never on Sunday and Psycho. She prowls up to Anthony Perkins and perches beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’

OLYMPIC COAST ZONE AS JG BALLARD THEME PARK

Permitted paths vanish into dunes of landfill, into neurotic traffic, into rail tracks and tramways. But the old road, the ghost road, the one that was here before all this madness, has become a favoured route for joggers and cyclists. The Olympic Park, that corrupted legacy, is like mid-period Fellini: kite flyers, moody urbanists in long overcoats, white cars parked in unlikely places, a glitter of sea you can never quite reach. Across the coastal highway, over the tracks, is an area of balconied flats, steel-blue offices, and sex clubs with scarlet promises: STRIP LIVE SHOW. The final doodle on a white board marking the end of the Olympic zone confirms Neo Faliro as a JG Ballard theme park without content: THAT HEAVEN WOULD WANT SPECTATORS.

HELENA SMITH: 14/2/10

‘The peak, and the beginning of the end of the boom, came when Athens pulled off a successful Olympic Games in 2004. Hosting the world’s biggest sporting event was seen as a national triumph, but, at nearly €9bn, the games also stretched Greek coffers to breaking point.’

Iain Sinclair

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JZ Young Lecture Theatre

Gower Street, UCL

WC1E 6BT

University College London. Urban Laboratory.

Speakers:

Lara Almarcegui

Eleanor Fawcett

Andrew Harland

Tony Lloyd-Jones

Jason Prior

Iain Sinclair

Chair: Matthew Gandy, UCL Urban Laboratory

The event is free but registration is necessary. Click here to register and for more info.

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