Maraveyas Ilegal

Greece’s Big Debt Drama Is a Muse for Its Artists

ATHENS — The debt crisis here has created an intriguing bright spot: a burst of artistic activity in response to the national identity crisis it has provoked.

“It’s as if someone asked you that you have to be a different person tomorrow,” the novelist Alexis Stamatis said in a recent interview. “Every artist has a dilemma. On the one hand, we are witnessing history in the making. On the other, we are suffering.”

Beyond the depressing headlines, there’s a manic side of Greece today, especially in Athens, which has an energy not seen elsewhere in the slow-moving Mediterranean. Art galleries are thriving. Street artists paint tiny gems amid the growing downtown squalor. A new generation of filmmakers has captured the air of uncertainty by making the familiar strange. Athens is an anarchic, overcaffeinated mess of a city, filled with oleander and concrete, jasmine and car exhaust: part Milan and part Karachi, a strange combination of European sophistication and third world chaos. The economic crisis has accentuated the divide.

“Athens is like a volcano,” said Kostis Maraveyas, 37, a pop star and composer who merges traditional Greek music with other Mediterranean sounds. “Sometimes it explodes, and then it goes back to normal.”

In the past decade Athens’s downtown has become blighted: immigrants squat in dilapidated buildings; drug addicts writhe on the sidewalks; the walls of concrete apartment blocks are covered in graffiti. But art sprouts from the decay.

On a recent night a 30-year-old who goes by the handle Bleeps.gr drove around the Psiri neighborhood pointing out his street art, a tour guide to the underworld. On the side of one building he had painted an image of a woman clutching a sack of euros, a golden halo around her head, on which was written, in Greek, “Forty Years + Debtocracy.” The number referred to the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974, following a seven-year military dictatorship, after which the government hired thousands of state workers, leading to today’s debt woes.

“It’s about the debt crisis,” the artist said, with a strong northern British accent. (He said he had worked as a dentist in Bristol, the hometown of Banksy, the British graffiti artist, and, like Banksy, would not reveal his real name.)

“She’s dreaming, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” he added. Nearby, another painting showed a model on a catwalk against a blue backdrop, on which was written, “Greece, next economic model.”

In recent years art galleries have cropped up amid the Chinese bargain shops and Pakistani immigrants in the Metaxourgio (pronounced meh-TACK-soor-YEE-oh) neighborhood here. Through this month, a dozen galleries are participating in ReMap, an international contemporary-art platform.

At the Kunsthalle Athena, an exhibition titled “Summer in the Middle of Winter” filled the beautifully run-down old building, a warren of rooms with peeling paint, ornate moldings and spotty wiring. On the moldy walls of one room hung a simple, understated image by the Greek artist Lydia Dambassina: a Greek flag folded on a desk, with a copy of the newspaper Ta Nea from March 2010, around the time that Greece’s foreign lenders sent representatives to visit, and the words in German, “Alle Wege Sind Verschlossen,” or “All ways are closed.”

On another wall was a clever, wistful installation by the young Greek artist Stefania Strouza, who typed phrases from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and framed them. “Before the time seemed Athens as a paradise to me,” read one. “The jaws of darkness do devour it up: so quick bright things come to confusion,” read another. “My soul consents not to give sovereignty,” another.

Metaxourgio was filled with artistic fervor, and also people selling drugs in broad daylight. “It’s totally rough around the edges,” said Rebecca Camhi, who opened the gallery that bears her name there in 1995. And yet the crowds come to see art.

“People are buying less and less, to be honest, but there are more visitors,” she added.

Works by four young Greek artists, all under 30, hung on the walls of her bright exhibition space. Alexia Karavela’s slightly ironic yet heartfelt oil crayon sketches were inspired by photos found at garage sales: women dancing in a circle; old men sitting on a couch, drinking; a bride with fierce, pointy white teeth. In his dreamy, pixelated work, Vasilis Paspalis had taken a 19th-century image of a mother holding her small child to her cheek and erased the lines so the boundaries between their faces dissolved.

In Greece, it seems, everything comes back to family drama. That is especially true in film today, where a new generation of directors has pushed the Greek family beyond “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” clichés, using it as a lens to view the strange mood in a country still grappling with its past and increasingly uncertain about its future.

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In “Dogtooth,” which was nominated for the best foreign-language Oscar this year, the director Yorgos Lanthimos presents a tableau at once minimalist and grotesque, with incest, weird dialogue and animal mutilation.

“Attenberg,” directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, which Greece has submitted to be considered for an Academy Award nomination this year, is in the same vein. With awkward sex scenes and flat dialogue, it, too, self-consciously drains the family of emotion. It is all the complete opposite of the low-budget soap operas on Greek TV, with their shouting, angry women hurling crockery, and hairy men in bed with fleshy women in negligees who probably aren’t their wives.

Ms. Tsangari’s film is affecting, in spite of its studied lack of affect. In one scene Marina, the protagonist, arranges for her atheist, socialist father, who is dying of cancer in an unnamed Greek industrial port city, to be cremated, a rite not permitted by the Greek Orthodox church. The funeral consultant suggests options. “I propose sending him to Hamburg, where services are more advanced,” he says.

And if she doesn’t want to travel with the coffin? “The ashes are sent via cargo to the Athens airport,” he answers. “We prefer Greek airlines out of respect for the deceased.” These throwaway lines somehow perfectly capture Greece’s dark mood, and its fraught relationship with Germany, the European superpower that seems to hold its fate.

Back in Athens on a recent evening, the Knossos Theater Company performed a version of “Antigone” in an open-air arena cleft in high, rocky hills. It merged that classical Sophocles play with Brecht’s 1948 version, in which Brecht had transformed the original ambiguous message into a critique of Fascism and Nazism, making Antigone a heroine for defying the regime in order to bury her traitorous brother.

Antigone was gothlike, with long jet-black hair and ripped stockings. Even to a non-Greek speaker, as she railed at Creon, ruler of Thebes, the question at the heart of the play was clear: What do we owe the family, and what do we owe the state? As the Greek crisis unfolds, these ancient questions are made painfully real. And another generation of Greek artists is asking them anew. - THE NEW YORK TIMES