The Precarious Archive is a long-term project centered around a collection of approximately 900 images, the result of ten years’ research into various public and private archival institutions, press offices, and newspapers in Greece. The visual material chronologically covers a period of about forty years from 1963 to 2002. It reflects some of the major political events that took place in post-war Greece that are also connected to European and world history, such as the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Greek dictatorship, and the Marxist guerrilla organization 17 November, to name just a few. This collection of images constitutes an idiosyncratic archive that touches upon atypical archival strategies, questions methods of representation, reflects on images as multidimensional, economy-driven hyper-commodities, and ultimately questions the notion of visibility in our mediated democracies. The Precarious Archive consists of two interlocking components: a) the archive as a physical and conceptual presentation, and b) the performer as a continuous live action that activates and interacts with the archive and the public.

—Stefanos Tsivopoulos