On Friday September 21, 2018, queer activist and drag performer Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh was killed in broad daylight by police and the owner of a jewelry store in the Omonoia neighborhood of downtown Athens, Greece. Both immediately afterward and in the years following the murder, the LGBTQ community has organized numerous protests and constructed various improvised memorial sites that celebrate Zak's life and collectively mourn his loss. Developing an innovative methodological approach that combines sensory ethnography with videography and critical walking, this multi-media research article documents this antifascist public memory project in the act of its collective constitution. Presenting a mediatized version of our embodied interactions with these living memorials to Zak—from topographic archives to repertoires of protests and walking performances—we examine the ways in which the ongoing queering of public memory disrupts not only the institutionalized but also the daily and domesticized fascism of the νοικοκύρη: the patriarchal authority of the household's domestic economy.

Warning: This video contains disturbing imagery and descriptions of the violent public murder of Ζακ Κωστόπουλος, the most graphic of which can be found between the following timestamps: 01:15-2:25 and 2:58-3:50.

[runtime: 23:07]



Transcript    [pdf]

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» Daniel Dilliplane is a scholar-activist with a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on performance activism, and his creative practice emphasizes the sensory and somatic dimensions of collectivity as the basis for countering the atomizing politics of neoliberalism. He has led performance for social change workshops for universities, theatres, non-profit research institutes, and autonomous art and activism spaces across the US as well as internationally. His article "Staging Progressive Dissensus and the Politics of Black Silence" has recently been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

» Christina Banalopoulou holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She currently works as a visiting assistant professor in the project Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas at the University of Milan. Christina's primary areas of interest include minoritarian performance, feminist economics, and the intersections between the somatic and the political, with a focus on the Mediterranean. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals, including Theatre Research International, Mediterranean Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Rethinking Marxism, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, and Performance Philosophy.

» Stefanos Gkioultzouoglou tries to make music (mostly songs) based on a variety of greek music genres, combined with techniques and approaches from different traditions. He uses his name (Στέφανος Γκιουλτζούογλου) and the "name" Vaktro (Βάκτρο). [Bandcamp page]