Extreme Europe

This work explores the urban extremes of Europe in their cultural, physical, geographical and mythical dimensions. Extreme Europe considers the history and visual culture of Europe in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barber sets out to explore and define Europe’s political and conceptual edges, first making a circuit eastwards through Albania to Turkey, then south- and westwards along the Mediterranean coast, with stops in Crete and Marseilles. The book then moves through several decades of history as they can be read in both the surviving and rejuvenated fabrics of Berlin, and finally through the frayed, disaffected and multicultural landscapes of Paris’ outer suburbs. The author’s purpose in scanning Europe’s geographical and psychological extremes is to examine its cities and their surrounding areas as sites of a conflict between the mesmerizing, all-engulfing power of the visual media and the tenacious, barely surviving traces of traditional culture. The book maintains that the breakdown zones at Europe’s urban edges are the areas where its most oppositional and vital images and languages are being created today.