JULIA TULKE

Julia Tulke’s longitudinal Aesthetics of Crisis (AOC) project documents and analyses shifting currents on the walls of Athens. Julia follows Lyman Chaffee’s notion of political street art as a ‘barometer’ by tracing, in real time, newly emerging discourses and events: the austerity referendum and so-called refugee crisis of 2015; the growing visibility of feminist and queer protest and expression since the mid-2010s; dissent with documenta 14; anti-Airbnb and anti-gentrification sentiments; the response to COVID; and, most recently, graffiti removal as the aspirational performance of the end of crisis. Her work demonstrates the value of street art and graffiti as a methodological approach – rather than an object of analysis – able to render visible and sensible gradual changes in a particular urban social, political, and cultural landscape over time.

Julia is committed to digitally enabled public scholarship: her website is a central repository for her work and research outputs and her photo archive of 6500+ images is available via Flickr, complete with metadata and geotags and under CC licensing. Her extensive and openly accessible visual archive has supported the work of a range of scholars, educators, and organizers.

Julia’s AOC project provides a model for longitudinal visual engagement with a city in crisis, weaving together ethnographic and documentary sensibilities. Julia’s work enriches our understanding of culture and social life and models creative and effective applications of visual imagery to critical inquiry. This offers a polyphonic/polysemic counterpoint to the narrow and often fetishizing representation of ‘crisis cities’ which are often cast as objects of cultural fascination, for example through so-called ruin porn or celebrations of ‘crisis creativity’— e.g., via the ‘Athens-is-the-new-Berlin’ narrative. Julia moves beyond these tropes to provide a perspective grounded in the complex, and at times contradictory, material realities of everyday life, and the ways that artists and urban dwellers engage with these realities through the walls of the city in ways both earnest and playful. As such, Julia’s work significantly enhances the theory and practice of visual methodologies.

 

Wrong I Should We Open Governments
Welcome To Athens. Artist WD
Wake Up Rise Up!
The Television Will Not Be Revolutionised
Queer Revolution
Malakes! You Are The Refugees Of Europe, Solidarity With The Migrants
I M Tired Of Patriarchy
Hands Down. Artist  Pavlos Tsakonas
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    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

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    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

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    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

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    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

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    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

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    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

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    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

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    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

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    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

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    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

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