after/livesTHEME
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The 4th PSL on After/Lives took place June 29-July 7, 2022, in Makrinitsa - after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like so many events, from vacations, weddings, reunions, graduations, academic conferences, planned for 2020… and then held in 2021, 2022 or never at all, Pelion Summer Lab 4 was haunted by its constitutive afterness. Unfortunately we had several faculty members and students who could not attend due to COVID 19-related illness or travel issues. PSL 2022 on the theme of After/Lives addressed this pandemic-heightened sense of living-on in a haunted world and on a damaged planet. After/Lives names the line that, like a glitch, both interrupts and relays a transitional spacetime without foreseeable transition: of endurance after exhaustion, life after death, survival after extinction, emergence after submergence. Whereas the normative events mentioned at the outset presume an anthropocentric capitalist calendar, a drive to control (re)productive times, spaces, and bodies, and the civilizational conceits of an inconvenienced white privilege, PSL 2022 called for reparative readings of the present based in experimental reckonings with colonial histories of violence and their attendant late liberal economies of ruination and abandonment. The summer lab was thus organized into three clusters - Spectrality, Ruination and Survivance - and complemented by Experimental Humanities Studio Space-Time and the Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology. PSL 4 culminated on July 7 in Makrinitsa with a final public experiment designed and created by the cohort: the collaborative construction of a Shrine. PSL 4 was made possible with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (ECHN). The organizing committee for PSL 2022: Penelope Papailias, Pantelis Probonas, George Mantzios, Eftychia Vardouli. The following seminars and workshops were held by PSL 2022 faculty:
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EXPERIMENT
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Future Relics on a Damaged Planet: A Shrine.The experiment for PSL 2022, the collective design of a shrine. was presented publicly on Friday July 8, 2022 in Makrinitsa in an event entitled "Future Relics on a Damaged Planet: A Shrine."
PROMPT: 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 envisioned 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. |
EXPERIMENT
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PEOPLE
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Organizers
Penelοpe Papailias George Mantzios Pantelis Probonas Penny Paspali |
Cohort
Marc Bellinghausen Evie Despotopoulou Vassilis Gerasopoulos Margarida Farinha Isabella Haid Hazal Halavut Wesam Hassan Holly Hudson Georgia Koumantaros Natalia Koutsougera Maria Lagou Carol Montealegre Anna Mundet Molas Annan Nour Penny Paspali Beja Protner João Sá Christian Schirmer Angela Sgouros Rapti Siriwardane-De Zoysa Julia Tulke Georgia Vavva Vita Zelenska Chris Zisis Despoina Zoupa |
Faculty
Krista Caballero Elizabeth Chin Olga Cielemęcka Margaret Gibson Gastón Gordillo Pamila Gupta Gwyneira Isaac George Mantzios Jenny Marketou A. Sayeeda Moreno Penelope Papailias Gene Ray Dominique Townsend Alice Von Bieberstein |
CO-ORGANISED WITH THE SUPPORT OF
