Jürgen Nefzger - Athens
"In a city haunted by its decline, disused billboards are revealing agents that unmask one
of the most deeply rooted illusions of consumerist societies: the one that confuses
diversity of goods and pluralism.
The sudden disappearance of the advertising posters makes a breach in this idyllic tale.
As in Godard’s Alphaville, where the destruction of the central computer leads to the
immediate death of the inhabitants, the massive extinction of the messages reveals the
centralised, controlled nature of commercial pluralism. The blankness of the disused panels
masks an imposture: the one that insists on seeing the joyous graphic anarchy of adverts as
an index of freedom. When blank, the billboards emerge as a malfunctioning centralised
system, a defective totalitarian system."
Christophe Catsaros in Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 2011
