Katerina Foti: BLUE

“BLUE” is a song about women’s unhealed urban loneliness and about each memory buried under buildings that are under construction; edifices that change use, hands, and names. It is the sound of all those we hid or found buried under a tarp, and which we never communicated, as we didn't even have time or the right words to share.

“BLUE” is the pulse of this city's female memory: It is sung and heard each time a girl seeks a collective female beat into which they can integrate their voice. In a city oscillating between the outermost mutation and the complete deregulation of any notion of collective existence, our shared song spills out into the streets, releasing all that is unspoken and silenced, reverberating and vibrating through our bodies.

We live in the era of the Great Exhaustion. More tired than ever, emotionally drained, and trying to balance between the multitude of information and forced productivity, we are driven to a devastating personal time shortage, increasingly turning in on ourselves and opting for social withdrawal. In a city suffocating with residents crammed into apartment buildings, bars, theaters, means of transportation, offices, public services, streets, and parties, a city rapidly transforming into an immense tourist park, determining its identity through the reconstruction of buildings, the city’s de-collectivization, and the dissolution of any sense of neighborhood, we constantly crowd together but never meet in a meaningful way.

Women living in suffocating, overpopulated cities are confronted with a feeling of unhealed loneliness that further intensifies their inevitable fatigue. Overloaded with the burdens of everyday life, but also with the burdens of the personally experienced gender discrimination that marks their existence, they try to perform their social roles through multiple limitations. Every move and act of theirs is monitored and controlled by rules they did not set themselves, while concurrently their limited time condemns them to communication breakdown. At the same time, these women are forced to undergo separations that ultimately define their very identity in an ever-changing environment. For them, loss is not only an outcome of mortality but also a result of the complete absence of collective spaces and a sense of coexistence.

“BLUE” is a collective song about the loss of the city – a modern obituary for the neighborhood in decay. I aim to speak for each and every one of us who struggles to stand tall, having been forced to bury under a tarp their collective and individual traumas, objects rendered obsolete, or their hopes for a collective daily life. “BLUE” is a cry for those seeking a slice of blue sky in a city drowning in blue-colored tarps.

“Blue” is the product of a research process that, as I’ve realized, began long before it was captured in words. The gist of the research revolved around the concept of the city as a condition; that is, I wondered how we inhabit a city that constantly changes, how we renegotiate our presence in a place swept by tourists and the so-called development, what we miss from a previous iteration of the city we were forced to leave behind, and what it is that remains buried under the reconstructed and restored buildings. Regarding the repurposed buildings, particularly the blue tarp covering construction sites became a key visual reference. Behind this tarp, a piece of personal and collective remembrance remains hidden—the past lives of people who played an integral role in the reconstruction of Athens through the proliferation of the apartment blocks (‘polykatoikía’) and who raised our generation inside these buildings. And now, our generation faces the risk of being left ‘homeless’ because of the plan that envisions the city as a recreational park rather than a neighborhood and a platform of coexistence. Therefore, “Blue” partially emerged from the blue tarps and their symbolism, acting as an object that points toward the loss of parts of the city that are irreversibly receding into oblivion.