No.1 in England is the fruit of the collaboration between musician Jay Glass Dubs and his long time friend artist/director Panagiotis Kostouros.
Dedicated as a whole to the late maestro and compatriot of Papadatos, Vangelis Papathanassiou, the four primary music pieces composed and recorded during the pandemic, embrace the spectral echoes of JGD’s earlier methodologies, but solemnly directed into more sparse and harmonic territories, tracing glimpses towards his cinematic universe.
Kostouros’s footage accompanies the musical performance, through a portraits series of lost and discarded Athenian urban elements. Pathways, complexes and complexities; capturing the city’s financial, political, and social strife through the lens of a foreign wanderer.
During the 45 minute single-shot journey through the lower parts of Acharnon and Patission—among the last non-gentrified neighborhoods in central Athens—the roamer (an ironic former ‘UK’ citizen), walks on a route far from the tourist traps of central Athens, disrupted occasionally, with footage of what the creators suggest as a “New Greek Monumentality”. These interspersed segments feature incomplete buildings, unattended structures, failed projects, and emergent paradigms, existing as liminal spaces straddling history and economy, society and reality.
The combination of these different elements provides a thorough critique of success and excellence, revealing the harmful effects of these vague capitalistic ideals. If history is written by the winners, this work serves as a solemn reminder of the deep truths held by the losers—truths marked by their shared suffering.
As a work in progress, this project aspires to expand its gaze to cities and areas worldwide that are teetering on the brink of gentrification, capturing and preserving the raw, unvarnished essence of these endangered urban landscapes, amplifying the voice of memory against lethe.
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