A moment can last a long time. Here, I want to spell out the moment of our travel across North America during the month of April in the year of 2011. A moment that stretched over nineteen days or, otherwise, over quite precisely 456 hours.

What lay behind travlling along small stretches of one ocean and another was the urge to start building links of affinity and solidarity, to make a first step in shattering the mediation of spectacle that has wrapped around and kept our struggles apart. This, I think, did happen.

But another strange thing also happened. It was as if the dam holding back the unsaid and the unseen was lying just behind the airport’s arrivals security desk: from the split second after we passed through, a deluge of images and stories started to well up. The next few pages contain a hurried attempt to put some of these images and stories together, and so to keep them close. But they also contain an attempt to understand our American experience through the lens of our own experiences in struggles and in places far, far away.

An attempt to read our differences and similarities as traced in this vast space. Space, as John Berger would have it, not so much as an emptiness but as an exchange.

I hope these pages are the sound-check to our exchange.

Antonis in Exarcheia, Athens in the month of May, in the year of 2011.