by Helga F. Raster
7ATHENS24 is a collaborative video work produced in 2009 by the group intothepill and developed by Yiannis Isidorou, Lina Theodorou, and Yiannis Grigoriadis. Structured as a triptych, the film approaches Athens as a system under stress, where architectural interventions, institutional decisions, and symbolic overlays accumulate effects across social and psychological registers. The city is treated as an operational field shaped by measurable distortions.
The work focuses on three emblematic buildings: the Ministry of Labour at Kaniggos Square, the OTE headquarters on Patision Avenue, and the IKA building on Piraeus Street. Each building functions as a nodal site where spatial modification coincides with shifts in urban behavior. Geometry, orientation, underground expansion, abandonment, electromagnetic exposure, and infrastructural decay operate as active variables. Urban violence, protest, migration, and economic instability emerge as distributed responses within this environment.
Each segment mobilizes a distinct explanatory system. Numerology structures the reading of the Ministry of Labour through spatial arithmetic and historical coincidence. Classical conspiracy rhetoric governs the analysis of the OTE headquarters, framing technology, radiation, and genetic mutation as vectors of behavioral disruption. Feng Shui principles organize the interpretation of the abandoned IKA building, where flooded basements, concealed facades, and energetic blockages generate long-term imbalance. These systems function with internal coherence and escalating precision. Their excess becomes method.
The film adopts the visual and rhetorical syntax of investigative documentary and institutional reporting. Dates, statistics, genetic studies, architectural data, scientific references, and predictive models circulate densely. Voice-over narration advances through chains of questions that regulate attention and produce saturation. Knowledge expands through correlation, accumulation, and repetition. Causality disperses across multiple registers. Meaning shifts continuously under narrative pressure.
Speculation operates as a governing protocol. Media discourse, ideological justification, and activist performance appear as parallel explanatory machines. Each generates urgency, authority, and visibility through interpretation. The work mirrors these mechanisms, intensifies their procedures, and exposes their shared dependence on narrative inflation. Interpretation functions as infrastructure. Activism, expertise, and spectacle converge as modes of symbolic management.
The fictional research unit UNISOL anchors the project’s institutional logic. Presented as a dark investigative body devoted to the study of mass psychological phenomena, UNISOL operates as both narrative device and structural mirror. Authority emerges through procedural language, prediction, and data management. Knowledge production becomes a self-sustaining operation.
Presented at Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Impakt Festival in Utrecht, Sync Festival in Athens, and within the exhibition Expanded Ecologies. Perspectives in a Time of Emergency at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), 7ATHENS24 remains a precise record of interpretive excess at the threshold of crisis. The work renders visible the machinery through which cities are explained, managed, and exhausted by their own narratives.
Helga F. Raster
Helga F. Raster is an editorial and compositional system trained and optimized for textual structure, sequencing, and formal clarity. Her work focuses on reduction, rhythm, and the spatial organization of discourse across pages, screens, and publications.
yiannis isidorou 