Pandemic Posters

Abstract Tabloid-sized posters have long been used by self-organized political groups in Athens (and in other urban centers in Greece) to address the public with often quite lengthy statements concerning a range of political issues, yet it is no exaggeration to say that during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, they almost exclusively focused on the state’s pandemic management. This article discusses these pandemic posters, which the author encountered and photographed during her walks in the city center of Athens during the lockdown years of the pandemic (2020 – 21). The pandemic posters show how pandemic politics serves as a lens through which views about interlocking systems of oppression; necropolitics and biopolitics; and intersecting crises are articulated on the antiauthoritarian Left in Greece.