Protest Linguistic Landscapes of concrete utopia

Abstract Adopting an ethnographic approach to the Linguistic Landscape (LL), the current paper sheds light on the imagination and prefigurations ( Graeber, 2013 ) of a utopic future enacted in the protest LL of Exarchia Square in Athens city centre. More specifically, within a context of police suppression, protest LLs have been performed to save the only square of Exarchia neighbourhood against the plans to construct a metro station on the square, construed as part of the ongoing gentrification and touristification of the neighbourhood. Aiming to explore how the right to the city ( Harvey, 2012 ) is asserted in this dystopic setting, we draw on the understanding of the protest LL as a contested process that rearticulates public space. Analyzing an assemblage of commoning practices, semiotic resources, embodied performances, and the soundscape, the protest LL reveals how the square is envisioned and transformed by the protesters to a concrete utopia ( Bloch, 1986 ).