Europe is facing a profound transformative period. Exploring how the EU’s governments are responding to the economic and migration crisis is providing valuable insights in its present functioning.
HotSpot is a research/art film addressing these current affairs, and intends to reveal a future prognosis by highlighting a particular case.

Eleonas, a dilapidated industrial area, central of Athens, sets the stage. In the midst of this zone, a supposedly ‘transitional’, refugee accommodation center is located. Additional each weekend an ostensibly government tolerated, extremely chaotic trash-flee market is organized there. Clubs of garbage collectors joint by a bizarre eclectic rabble of multi-ethnic urban scavengers, are selling their junk of questionable origins. The disparate and incompatible users of this area are forming fascinating synergies but are also experiencing obvious collisions by trespassing each others’ demarcated territories.

By following and observing how the refugees are utilizing this market to build their ‘temporary’ homes and lives and how they try to regain identity through their actions, a glimpse of their prospect is revealed. Parallel to this reality, it is clearly exposed how Europe and Greece are dealing with their impending predicament.

Indisputably an absurd situation, but could we assume that in a distant future this seemingly illicit pseudo-economic insanity might become ubiquitous, wherever the income divide is increasing and where displacement of people is becoming pervasively prevalent. Does this phenomenon disclose something about our coming reality of tomorrow?

Tony Maslić – 2016