Anthropo-scenes |
Restaging climate dramas for environmental justice |
THEME
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This year’s lab, Anthropo-scenes, will be an experiment in ecodramaturgy, bringing together speculative ethnography, Black geographies, decolonial thought, landscape architecture, and community-based theater to reimagine forms of agency and relationality in the wake of climate collapse. As anthropologist, novelist and decolonial theorist Amitav Ghosh has argued, the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Recognizing the urgency of moving beyond dominant narratives of crisis and recovery, this year’s lab will experiment with new ways of staging, witnessing, and engaging with climate realities. We will explore creative forms of non-extractive relationality that respond to the everyday challenges—and anticolonial histories—of living otherwise on a damaged planet.
On our screens, we regularly witness climate crises around the world as media events aestheticized via familiar cinematic phantasmagorias and as challenges to be strategized through survivalist gameplay. These dominant techniques of representation and simulation mask ordinariness and predictability in extraordinariness (Mike Davis), the actual imperceptibility -by humans- of the scale, temporality and interactional complexity of anthropogenic climate change and, of course, the continuous predicament of their aftermath. Climate drama also sets up a repertoire of responses that - in the so-called West - seems to inevitably prioritize certain kinds of expertise (bring in the engineers, not the social researchers, the artists, the movements), priorities (back-to-business, rebuilding rather than unbuilding), infrastructure (‘gray’ rather than ‘green’ or ‘blue’, technologies rather than technics of commoning) and timeframes (immediate action rather than pausing, moving on rather than re-collecting). How might we restage contemporary climate dramas? What would this entail? Could we flip the script from ecocide to ecojustice? Might such exercises in living-otherwise ‘make a difference’ toward en-acting more livable, inhabitable, inclusive futures? |
EXPERIMENT
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WEATHERING-TOGETHER: A Site-Responsive Ecodramaturgy“Peira(g)ma: An Experiment in Weathering Together” was staged on the afternoon of July 7, 2025, in the village of Neochori in South Pelion.
PSL 6 “Anthropo-scenes: Restaging Climate Dramas” Τhis ecodramaturgy was the final action of the 6th Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities in which we experimented with new ways of staging, witnessing, and engaging with climate realities. How do we embody climate change beyond spectacular media events, statistics, policy debates, and technical solutionism? Can theater materialize more livable, inhabitable futures by shifting affective, relational, and epistemic conditions? What forms of collaborative survival and resistance emerge when communities stage their own ecological histories and futures? PSL 6 Organizing Team: Penelope Papailias (director), George Mantzios, Alexandros Papageorgiou, Pantelis Probonas, Penny Paspali, Dimitra Morosou Peira(g)ma “Peira(g)ma” in Greek is a play on the word for experiment (Peirama) and Peiragma (bothering/teasing) and reflects the playful nature of the experiment as a public intervention. Disrupting accepted idioms of talking about ourselves and our worlds whether in academia or the village square, we hoped to invoke the potential of alternatives. The performance was developed over the course of the 10-day lab, building on Dina Stamatopoulou’s techniques of community-based theater, incorporating ideas and experiences from seminars (on aesthetics of environmental harm, for instance), explorations around the village (to the local quarry, for instance), screenings, materialities (from the 2023 Thessaly floods, for instance) and, above all, converations and encounters with members of the communtity and each other. The final ecodramaturgy produced a site-responsive intervention that engaged the tensions and the wonder of our collective meeting in Neochori over ten days of early summer 2025 and, moreover, problematized how we ought to organize ourselves socially, coexist environmentally, and resist politically. The Players: Lambro Avgoustopoulos, Nina Gribling, Dennis Gupa, Maria Karazanou, Markela Koniordou, Tsovinar Kuiumchian, Markia Liapi, Yara Malka, Giorgos Melissourgos, Dimitra Morosou, Dimitra Papourtzi, Antonis Petras, Athanasia Papadimitriou, Karolina Rybaciauskaite, Conor Smith, Anna Stroulia The Director: Dina Stamatopoulou Video: Christos Schoinas Graphics: Katerina Giannitsi |
PEOPLE
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Organizers
Penelοpe Papailias George Mantzios Pantelis Probonas Penny Paspali Dimitra Morosou Tom Western |
Cohort
Lambro Avgoustopoulos Nina Gribling Dennis Gupa Maria Karazanou Markela Koniordou Tsovinar Kuiumchian Markia Liapi Yara Malka Giorgos Melissourgos Dimitra Morosou Dimitra Papourtzi Antonis Petras Athanasia Papadimitriou Karolina Rybaciauskaite Conor Smith Anna Stroulia |
Faculty
Aspasia Kouzoupi Hiba Bou Akar Dina Stamatopoulou Eray Çayli Agata Lisiak Petros Perrakis Anthi Kosma |
CO-ORGANIΖED WITH THE SUPPORT OF
