I caught a common cold here in Athens as summer is turning to fall, and indoors the temperature barely differs from the street. The city is changing slightly. The tourists’ faces morph from sweaty, confused expressions to calm and collected. It becomes harder to tell who is a local and who is not, and I find myself listening for languages in the conversations of others, though I am aware that this noticing says more about my wish to belong than about the people I am watching.

I have been here for three weeks now and have exceeded the time I have ever spent in Athens before. Just like the shift of the seasons, my own image of the city is shifting. It is less exotic, less bewildering, and I can feel a confusion settling in my thoughts about this place as it moves from a surface image to a real place.

In many ways it is like any other European big city, but with more challenges, or at least different ones. Like any of the multitude of cultures that constitute ‘Europe’, Greece is a phase-shifted version of another place. Culture seems to work like this many times, as a variation of skin on the same animal. It makes my work harder, and at the same time more interesting, to realize that the difference between Sweden and Greece is smaller than what connects us, and that the struggles we face are experienced in very similar ways. The differences reside more in the ‘Now’, in what moment is actively playing out in each society’s life cycle.

I feel as if Greece is a place in transformation. But what exists beyond my horizon? What is it that I cannot grasp from my Stockholm view? What is that component which makes this place inspire me, and why do I feel it holds a key to another possibility for a future European identity, a Europe excessively in the claws of a Western world adopted from across the Atlantic?

I set out to research this place as an ‘Otherworld’, a place that has not yet been ‘worlded’: not fully settled in a common conception of what reality is. And I should admit, from the start, what this framing serves. The person who benefits from Athens remaining an un-‘worlded’ Otherworld is me, the external observer, dreaming of a world that is yet to exist. Isn’t it better for the people who live here to become part of this machine that is the Western Empire, with all that this entails? I am not the one to answer that question. But I cannot honestly leave it behind, either; it follows me through everything I describe below.

I wanted to find representations of this in sounds, textures, and objects. Sadly, I notice that what I capture loses what I perceived it to contain once it is documented. My own bias as to what reality is influences what I capture, inevitably ‘worlding’ those things into my own already colonized world.

A key to my interest in Athens resides in my memory of my first visits to Berlin in 2004, the 15th year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The biggest shock of that transformation had subsided, but the city still existed in-between, on the threshold of two old worlds, the Soviet one and the American one. I would spend time in Friedrichshain, Neukölln, and Kreuzberg, areas filled with immigrants, old people, punks, junkies, artists, and techno people. Squats were everywhere. People were using their creativity in the ruins of the old world to construct something they could believe in. It seemed like a place that was birthing another world.

Slowly, with every visit, it became clear that the direction of Berlin had been set: the pathway towards the Western Metropolis, a place where adaptation and economic structures follow the ideas of any place within the Empire that is the globalized West. Franchises, wine bars, and expensive galleries took over. Friedrichshain transformed into a street that was not the street I first saw. It became part of a world; it became ‘worlded’. Kreuzberg and Neukölln followed suit but kept some of their aesthetic surface, a strange Disneyland for cultural people sitting there surrounded by normalcy, in constant negotiation with the powers that be, while the population inside those areas become more like cultural signifiers with stable jobs than explorers searching for an alternative future.

Growing up in Sweden during the late 80s and early 90s was, of course, a situation claimed by this radical European change that was the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can personally remember a society split between the East and the West (my favorite example being that of fast food). After school, if your parents had stocked up, you would pick a frozen snack from the freezer. The same brand manufactured both the Billys Pan Pizza and the Gorbys Pirogi, each carrying the packaging aesthetic of the global superpower most connected to those foods. Even the paradoxical format, with its very few choices of fast food in contrast to the choice between these two, tells the story of a society with one foot in each world. Today, I think both still exist, but the Gorby is rarely seen, and definitely not the one with porridge flavor.

In this sense, I grew up in a society that experienced this radical ‘worlding’ firsthand: a geopolitical moment where the narrative of reality was being formed. I grew up embracing the world of Billys Pan Pizza, consuming the dream of America and all the culture that came with it, from Walt Disney to Marvel, Thrasher Magazine, hardcore punk, and eventually contemporary art. It was not until much later that I realized all the dreams connected to this culture belonged to someone else. The center of my identity had not been formed around a place where I exist, but around a place I have observed and internalized. In this world, my dreams always point away from myself, my family, and my neighbors, and instead make me subservient to something that fundamentally has nothing to do with me. This, I think, is the root of my aversion toward the center of the empire, as well as a consequence of decades of successful soft power applied to Europe. Today, the quality of any kind of cultural expression is unavoidably tied to the measures of a global West. It is by these metrics that I even view, and judge, my own work. To summarize: the perceived reality wherein you participate in the world is a reality where you are not the main actor, but a peripheral replica of the acting that goes on somewhere else, repeating and reinforcing the world that is put upon you.

Athens entered the economic crisis in 2008, which is now 18 years ago. A similar shift is happening here, even if the outcome is not yet fully decided. Gentrification is still a hot topic and the income gap is exploding like everywhere else. The question is if this place will follow the same fate as Berlin, or if the resilience of Athens is stronger.

I 3D scan a lot of objects when I am here. Supposedly, it captures reality in an extra dimension compared to a picture. My phone is filling up with scans of everything from small Batman motorbikes to painted cactuses and ancient monuments. When I look at them, they seem explicitly dead, like I stole something that did not want to be stolen and later died from the sorrow of being captured. Never before have I felt so strongly related to the old Greek idea of aesthetics, where, to simplify with my own interpretation, a depiction of something real is the lowest form of art: it simply already exists in perfection. And yet I keep scanning, because I need to do something with these models that sends them away from their origin, not diluting it and pointing back toward it, but letting them be something in themselves. It is like Heidegger’s reading of van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes: the work is more a textured lump of paint than a painting of anything, and that is precisely its freedom.

My place of residence, Stockholm, is unique in its own way. Still, compared to this place, it has incorporated the Global West to such an extent that it has entered the status of the Anyplace. In its most depressing description, it is another skin on a Fortnite character. It is not a textured lump of paint on a van Gogh painting; it is a slick picture of a shoe. It is not changing seasons; it is temporarily stuck in summer, a summer that is brighter and more summery somewhere else.

And here, at the end, is what I keep circling: the curse of the Anyplace is to be a road sign pointing towards a center that exists somewhere else, a location that, through its architecture, art, culture, and economics, has accepted the reality of another world happening at another place. To progress in such a place as an individual or a group means moving toward the world your Anyplace is mimicking. There simply is no other option besides falling into what would appear as madness. That is the trap I recognize in myself, with my dreams pointing away from where I live; and it is the trap I am trying, through this place, to imagine a way out of.