Cindy Milstein (they) on Nostr: I’ve come to believe that there might be more circle As scrawled across Athens than ...

I’ve come to believe that there might be more circle As scrawled across Athens than there are people living here, meaning that this city, per capita, may have the highest recognition of anarchism, or at least its symbolism. And without romanticizing that (potential) fact, there is a palpable relation between art and politics, and more crucially, art and possibility.

Anarchism—its aspirations and practice—is “normalized” as part of the landscape. It is an option that one can, on the daily, see, find, and gravitate toward; a culture of resistance that’s clearly alive and active; a routine street sign that “we are many,” with all the promise that implies; and a ubiquitous assertion of an anarchist(ic) movement that backs up those tags, meaning it’s also a visible reminder and indeed threat to fascists.

Yet even without that relatively big movement, which ebbs and flows like everywhere else, there is profound power in not simply ceding territory to authoritarian narratives but also, importantly, carving out territories—borderless and autonomous, mapping otherworldly ways of self-determining our communal lives—across the face of the public sphere.

Because despite cynicism within our circles that words+symbols don’t matter—and more to the point, don’t change anything—christofascists have been busily demonstrating just the opposite.

Even before the Musk-Trump regime took state power, and especially immediately after, christofascists have busily been “buffing” words and symbols, increasingly erasing whole geographies, whether of gender or places (like today, the renamed Gulf of America, “thanks” to ally Google Maps). And without languages and images to counter these machinations, or allow people to perceive alternatives, much less feel they aren’t alone, it’s a short step to erasing whole categories of humans and nonhumans.

Street art in a kinder, gentler time might seem far more playful, far less pivotal. In a time of christofascist coup, though, it is deadly serious—a weapon on the battlefield of who determines where loyalties lie, what noncompliance looks like, what’s permissible, where cracks can be found, and who+what lives or dies.

(photos: various circle As seen around Athens, spray painted in various colors on dumpsters, walls, and more; photos continued in comments below this picture-post)