Ephemeral Lives Versus Colonial Afterlives: Building Decolonial Urbanisms Through Two African Culture Festivals in Athens

This paper examines how African migrantised and diasporic communities in Athens contest the city's dominant colonial imaginary through cultural festival practice. We argue that Athens has been constructed as a racialised chronotope: a frozen, whitened tableau anchored in classical antiquity that renders contemporary racialised presences peripheral, temporary, and illegible. Drawing on three years of Decolonial, Ethnographic, Participatory Arts‐Based Research (DEPABR), including the co‐organisation of two Afroathenian festivals in 2023 and 2024, we analyse how these ephemeral events functioned as methodological and political sites where questions of recognition, legitimacy, and belonging were actively negotiated. We show how debates over permits, venue selection, representation, and voice crystallised deeper chronopolitical tensions between present‐oriented strategies of institutional recognition and longer horizons of autonomous, commoning‐based claim‐making. Rather than resolving these tensions, we treat them as analytically generative, revealing the uneven distribution of risk, audibility, and temporal orientation that structures Black urban life in Europe's southern cities. We conclude that festival ephemerality, far from undermining political force, operates as a decolonising method: temporarily suspending the city's imposed stillness and opening space for plural histories, solidarities, and futures. The paper contributes to debates on urban chronotopes, citizenship, and decolonial urbanism.