FFF4 | Invisible City

Omonoia Square, in the heart of downtown Athens, is going to look somewhat different for a while, thanks to the eminent German artist. Schneider, who won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, is preparing a work for the Onassis Stegi's Fast Forward Festival 4, entitled "Invisible City", it employs the art of camouflage.

In fact, Schneider's entire oeuvre seeks to balance the visible and the invisible as he explores the relationship between private and public space, the imaginary and the real. The poetics of architecture, the many faces of the cityscape, are summarized in his work in the simple statement that "cities could be different if we could design and build them differently". He also references cities which offer a safe haven to the imagination in this era of perturbing transparency and the networked documentation of reality, a safe place where the concepts of surveillance, control, visibility and recognition seem to lose their dominance, albeit only for a time and in his work.

The use to which he puts camouflage in his Athenian action is bound up with the historic square's invisibility from above. The artist was inspired by the famous camouflaged locations of World War II like the aircraft factories on America's West Coast which were covered by gigantic sacks for the duration of the war for fear of Japanese bombing raids. His is a practice which, by protecting and camouflaging, distorts the image of the actual urban environment, meaning the appearance and reception of reality.