Experiment
Pelion Summer Lab culminates with a public experiment in which we open up the activities of the lab to peers, friends, colleagues, village residents, tourists and passers-by. We invite them to engage with the ideas, questions and creation that have come out of our ten days together. Every year the experiment takes a different form: in previous labs, for instance, the cohorts have staged an escape room and designed a trio of serious/critical games.
The experiment is always a risk: we never really know how it will go because it depends on who shows up and what they add. Indeed the invitation and the creation of a hospitable space of exchange is the critical first step of the experiment. The experiment is not the beginning, but also not the end: it is the result of experience, but meant to be tried again. In each context, it will be something different. In each instantiation, it has the potential to blast apart the regularized borders between research and dissemination, teaching and learning, expert and audience, argument and performance, the lab and the world.
The experiment for this year’s PSL, which will be presented publicly (inshallah) on Friday July 8, 2022 in Makrinitsa, is the collective construction of a Shrine.
We were drawn to the etymology of the word shrine, which comes from the Latin scrinium ‘chest for books or papers’. While later morphing into a chest for bones and relics of saints, this original meaning is evocative of the hybrid and multimodal assemblage that the cohort will thoughtfully gather and preserve in this vessel. We envision the shrine as a site of collective mourning for the heavy losses and unmarked deaths of the past years, the virulent damage to other species and to our planet, while also a refuge in which to reactivate and nurture bonds with spectral presences while imagining after/worlds. Shrines of course are sites of pilgrimage - in this case not for the one, but for the many, for the community to come. Shrines accrete. When people come to them, as we hope will happen during the lab and after, depending on how the shrine develops physically and online, they leave something of themselves. The shrine is inherently viral. It can even be mobile: a tabernacle. Both a broadcasting tower and a portal: transmitting and gathering. The shrine is ancient, but of our age.
If anything can, we believe that the Shrine can manifest and articulate After/Lives. Manifest what is no longer and what is not yet. Articulate what is unnamed while also making and holding space and time for the unnameable, particularly in its more-than-human forms.
The experiment is always a risk: we never really know how it will go because it depends on who shows up and what they add. Indeed the invitation and the creation of a hospitable space of exchange is the critical first step of the experiment. The experiment is not the beginning, but also not the end: it is the result of experience, but meant to be tried again. In each context, it will be something different. In each instantiation, it has the potential to blast apart the regularized borders between research and dissemination, teaching and learning, expert and audience, argument and performance, the lab and the world.
The experiment for this year’s PSL, which will be presented publicly (inshallah) on Friday July 8, 2022 in Makrinitsa, is the collective construction of a Shrine.
We were drawn to the etymology of the word shrine, which comes from the Latin scrinium ‘chest for books or papers’. While later morphing into a chest for bones and relics of saints, this original meaning is evocative of the hybrid and multimodal assemblage that the cohort will thoughtfully gather and preserve in this vessel. We envision the shrine as a site of collective mourning for the heavy losses and unmarked deaths of the past years, the virulent damage to other species and to our planet, while also a refuge in which to reactivate and nurture bonds with spectral presences while imagining after/worlds. Shrines of course are sites of pilgrimage - in this case not for the one, but for the many, for the community to come. Shrines accrete. When people come to them, as we hope will happen during the lab and after, depending on how the shrine develops physically and online, they leave something of themselves. The shrine is inherently viral. It can even be mobile: a tabernacle. Both a broadcasting tower and a portal: transmitting and gathering. The shrine is ancient, but of our age.
If anything can, we believe that the Shrine can manifest and articulate After/Lives. Manifest what is no longer and what is not yet. Articulate what is unnamed while also making and holding space and time for the unnameable, particularly in its more-than-human forms.
