AboutFTP
A. The story
The spread of smartphones has made it possible for more people to record and expose state and private crimes and violations of human rights.
Videos and photographs emerged as a digital tool, medium and weapon for producing evidence, and therefore for self-defence against state violence. Eyewitnesses filmed bombings, ecological disasters, police violence and more, contributing to an unprecedented, first-hand production of material, which in turn created new challenges of management and opened new possibilities in the social struggle for justice.
Police violence, as part of the wider violence of the state, does not lie only in the blow of the baton: it also turns against every proof that any violence took place. It criminalises memory, the circulation of images, the alternative narrative. It criminalises the presence and the gaze of bodies that refuse to go on their way or to look elsewhere. It is exactly this “simple”, substantial, observing presence that makes the foundations of state violence creak.
Film The Police was made to show what the collective documentation of violence by the Greek police can achieve.
On 20 November 2020, copwatch.gr appeared on social media for the first time. It was the second phase of the pandemic, with very strict public health measures: a curfew at 21:00 and later at 18:00, and a mandatory text message for every trip. The police presence in public space was threatening. Constant checks, fines, arbitrariness, violence.
It was then that raising a smartphone and pressing Rec began to work, at first, as a reflex of self-defence for individuals and communities. In a public space that had emptied and was dominated by the police, where there was no protection from the protectors, recording worked as self-protection: an eye that declared we see you, you cannot act unchecked, and we share what you do so that others see it too.