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 EcodramaturgyThis year's PSL will culminate in a public ecodramaturgical experiment titled “Weathering Together”, a collaborative, site-responsive theatrical performance developed in partnership with residents of Neochori, Mount Pelion, and led by theater director and actor Dina Stamatopoulou. This experiment will engage activists, scholars, artists, and local community members as theater practitioners in a co-learning and co-creation process that challenges dominant forms of knowledge production and environmental storytelling.
Ecodramaturgy invites us to reframe our relational understanding of the climate by turning ecological disaster into an opportunity for co-presence, dialogue, and improvised embodied response. It offers a theater of weathering—a shared space where different lifeforms (human and nonhuman), forces, and social actors can encounter each other, rehearse alternatives, and imagine otherwise. We draw inspiration from speculative fiction—Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Afrofuturism’s luminous traditions – performance and media studies, and decolonial practices, narratives, and visions founded on social and ecological justice to imagine and enact alternative modes of planetary habitation that defy technocratic solutionism, accelerationism, and ecofascism and offer, instead, revolutionary acts of place-making attuned to an ethics of mutualism, care, and ecojustice. By centering embodied, performative, and relational storytelling, the experiment will also challenge conventional knowledge hierarchies, breaking the divide between experts and the public, as well as between technical fields and the ‘soft’ humanities and social sciences, while exploring theater as an ecological and epistemic intervention. In staging scenes of ecological rupture, resistance, and speculative futures, we will ask: How do we embody climate change beyond spectacular media events, statistics, policy debates, and technical solutionism? How does performance unsettle the politics of expertise in environmental discourse? What forms of collaborative survival and resistance emerge when communities stage their own ecological histories and futures? Can theater materialize more livable, inhabitable futures by shifting affective, relational, and epistemic conditions? “Weathering Together” is thus not merely an artistic intervention but an act of engaged ecological pedagogy. It seeks to re-politicize environmental discourse by: 1) Foregrounding local knowledge over abstract policy solutions; 2) Resisting crisis narratives that foreclose community-led responses; and 3) Creating a laboratory for alternative imaginaries, where art and activism merge in the face of ecological collapse. As we explore new genres of climate storytelling throughout this year’s lab, we will grapple with the slow violence of environmental collapse—not as an isolated catastrophe but as an ongoing condition that is deeply entangled with race, nation, and histories of colonial extraction. By disrupting anthropocentric modes of knowledge, the culminating public experiment will expand the stage beyond human actors to include the more-than-human, allowing landscape, weather, and nonhuman life to become co-performers. Accordingly, by staging climate realities as lived, contested, and co-produced, this performance experiments with ways of living otherwise, unsettling dominant environmental scripts and opening space for ecojustice-centered futures. At its core, “Weathering Together” aspires to be an ecodramaturgical experiment in reimagining repair—not as a technical issue, but as a relational one. Provisional Structure of the ExperimentPhase 1: Collective Research and Storytelling Workshops
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PEOPLE
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Organizers
Penelοpe Papailias George Mantzios Pantelis Probonas Penny Paspali Dimitra Morosou Tom Western |
Cohort
Anna Stroulia Athanasia Papadimitriou Conor Smith Dennis Gupa Dimitra Papoutzi Giorgos Melissourgos Lampro Markela Koniordou Markia Liapi Nina Karolina Rybačiauskaitė Tsovinar Kuiumchian Yara Malka Antonios Petras |
Faculty
Aspasia Kouzoupi Hiba Bou Akar Dina Stamatopoulou Eray Çayli Agara Lisiak Petros Perrakis Anthi Kosma |
CO-ORGANIΖED WITH THE SUPPORT OF
