Part 1: Sentient Terrains, Situated Worlds
Beyond huMan and History: Tools for Re-Imagining Our Shared World
(Petros Perrakis Kollias on June 29)
(Petros Perrakis Kollias on June 29)
History has long been told in human voices. Even when the natural world enters the frame, as terrain to be crossed, resources to be harvested, or threats to be subdued—it’s often still there to support the human plot. The discipline of environmental history pushed back against that, bringing rivers, forests, and climates into the picture. But even then, the story often remains divided: people on one side, nature on the other, locked in interaction but still imagined as separate.
More-than-human histories ask us to go further. They begin with a simple, unsettling idea: that the world has never been just ours. That history is not simply something humans do to nature, but something made with countless others; animals, plants, waters, microbes, machines. These histories are not just enriched with nonhuman presence, they are fundamentally about entanglement. About co-creation.
This shift brings with it a new way, both of seeing and (re)imagining. It unsettles old categories—human/nature, subject/object, background/actor and insists on the messy in-between. It turns our attention to the friction where different lives meet, to the ways ecologies and technologies, species and infrastructures shape each other over time. It also brings a sharper awareness of power: who gets included in the story, whose agency is recognized, and whose losses are allowed to fade into silence.
Telling more-than-human histories means noticing how lives unfold together, unevenly, unpredictably, and asking what kind of responsibility that recognition brings. It means learning to speak from within the weave of the world, not above it.
- O’Gorman, Emily, and Andrea Gaynor. 2020. "More-Than-Human Histories." Environmental History 25(4): 711–735.
- The Wild Things Are Coming (2021), produced by Soft Agency.
- All That Breathes (2022), directed by Shaunak Sen.
Terrestrial Waters in Mediterranean Torrentscapes
(Aspassia Kouzoupi on June 30)
(Aspassia Kouzoupi on June 30)
The water we touch, smell, walk beside, and drink—is it the same water we crave on hot summer days? Are the rare drops of drought the same waters we fear when floods invade our homes? Across the Mediterranean, communities have long adapted to both water abundance and scarcity. But how prepared are our modern cities for these extremes? In the Pelion villages—part of the upper catchment of torrents flowing into the Pagasitikos Gulf—can we find traces of traditional water management? And can we still sense the relationship between these places and the communities shaped by them?
In this workshop, we will explore Neochori’s water sites and link them through participant narratives to other water-related memories from different geographies—places where each of us has felt at home with water. Using collective, experiential mapping—whether verbal, performative, or handcrafted—we will trace connections between sources and estuaries, memories and terrains.
By understanding the torrentscape as a whole—from Pelion’s upper catchments through its foothills to the coastal settlements of Volos—we will reflect on the September 2023 floodings and explore possibilities for reconciling with our torrents.
In this workshop, we will explore Neochori’s water sites and link them through participant narratives to other water-related memories from different geographies—places where each of us has felt at home with water. Using collective, experiential mapping—whether verbal, performative, or handcrafted—we will trace connections between sources and estuaries, memories and terrains.
By understanding the torrentscape as a whole—from Pelion’s upper catchments through its foothills to the coastal settlements of Volos—we will reflect on the September 2023 floodings and explore possibilities for reconciling with our torrents.
- Kouzoupi, Aspasia, "Perpetual Entelechy"
- Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire. Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.
- Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou.
In this experimental workshop we will synthesize new materialities from the residual, the everyday, the invisible, the discarded, the fragmentary, the organic, and the embodied. Through acts of deconstruction, decomposition, re/transformation, return, and redefinition, matter is deconstructed and rewritten, activated and reimagined. Matter escapes the linear chain of consumer production and re-enters the cycles of life, transforming narratives, experiences, and perceptions. The memory and imagination of materials in this [post]poetic workshop invite us to explore the usefulness of the useless, symbiotic possibilities, and transformations of the seemingly indifferent, incomplete, and not-completely-separated through small sculptural and performative actions.
At Pelion Summer Lab, materials sourced from local waste and organic residues bring histories and memories of the land into intra-action and multiple constitutions. The workshop is an invitation to materiality as posthuman touch and wonder. What is the matter with matter? Memories, residual matters as design tools? Lemon tea on the balcony, dust and fragments? How much power does a crack contain?
At Pelion Summer Lab, materials sourced from local waste and organic residues bring histories and memories of the land into intra-action and multiple constitutions. The workshop is an invitation to materiality as posthuman touch and wonder. What is the matter with matter? Memories, residual matters as design tools? Lemon tea on the balcony, dust and fragments? How much power does a crack contain?
- Barad, Karen. 2003. "Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter." Signs: Journal of women in culture and society 28(3): 801-831.
Part 2: Planetary Decolonial Ecologies
Earthmoving
(Eray Çaylı on July 2)
(Eray Çaylı on July 2)
[Still from Sedat Akdoğan’s video trilogy 'About Dry Land and Soft Clouds,' 2021 (reproduced with the artist’s permission)].
In today's world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread, extractivism operates no longer simply despite these sensibilities but rather by mobilizing them in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. "Earthmoving" conceptualizes this twofold process. In his forthcoming monograph of the same title and in this workshop session based on this book, Çaylı builds on his work since the mid-2010s in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century. The 2010s—a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war—saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Thinking together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism not only by making its harm visible, but also by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.
Participants are kindly asked to (1) bring along an image (e.g., a photograph, a video, a drawing, etc.) that they have produced or encountered in their research or work and that touches on the subject of colonial/decolonial planetary ecologies, and (2) prepare to briefly introduce it in light of the following questions: Who produced the image you have brought along? Where and when was it produced? What and whom does it visualize? How and when did you encounter the image; how did you access it (or if it is your own production, how/why did you produce it)? In what places, platforms or usage scenarios has it already circulated or could it potentially circulate?
Participants are kindly asked to (1) bring along an image (e.g., a photograph, a video, a drawing, etc.) that they have produced or encountered in their research or work and that touches on the subject of colonial/decolonial planetary ecologies, and (2) prepare to briefly introduce it in light of the following questions: Who produced the image you have brought along? Where and when was it produced? What and whom does it visualize? How and when did you encounter the image; how did you access it (or if it is your own production, how/why did you produce it)? In what places, platforms or usage scenarios has it already circulated or could it potentially circulate?
- Çaylı, Eray. 2021. "The Aesthetics of Extractivism: Violence, Ecology, and Sensibility in Turkey’s Kurdistan." Antipode 53: 1377-1399.
Living in the Dead Future
(Hiba Bou Akar on July 3)
(Hiba Bou Akar on July 3)
Villa Makahal,
Doha Aramoun, A Beirut Suburb. Photo by Hiba Bou Akar, Sedimentary Urbanization Project, 2018.
I am currently working on a book project titled Sedimentary Urbanization, an ethnographic and archival study of how low-income families and displaced Syrians access housing in the peripheries of Beirut. The book traces how these communities inhabit what I call “dead futures,” spaces shaped by once-promised urban plans that were abandoned due to war, economic collapse, or environmental degradation. Rather than seeing these sites as failed, the project explores how people carve out new modes of living, improvising shelter, infrastructure, garbage collection, and forms of community amidst systemic abandonment.
Sedimentary urbanization functions both as a conceptual lens and a method, sensitive to the layers of ruin, repetition, migration, and transformation that accumulate in the built environment over time. In this workshop, Living in the Dead Future, I will begin with a short introduction to this research and then invite participants to think together about how urban space is inhabited when the future is foreclosed. What kinds of life emerge in the cracks of broken plans? How do people dwell among fragments of collapse while mobilizing creativity, hope, and survival?
Through playful and reflective exercises in mapping, storytelling, object collection, and collage, we will explore how failed or incomplete designs become sites of invention. Together, we will ask what these forms of inhabiting abandoned, aborted, or derailed futures tell us about the present, and what other futures they might make possible.
Inspired by these questions, please bring a newspaper clipping, a photograph, a poem, a short piece of writing, or simply your curiosity. We will cut, draw, think, and share, reflecting on what it means to build life in the ruins of what was once imagined, and how that connects to your own questions, concerns, and creative or research practices.
Please watch this 10 min documentary from one of my research sites in Beirut, Lebanon, and read the following in preparation:
Sedimentary urbanization functions both as a conceptual lens and a method, sensitive to the layers of ruin, repetition, migration, and transformation that accumulate in the built environment over time. In this workshop, Living in the Dead Future, I will begin with a short introduction to this research and then invite participants to think together about how urban space is inhabited when the future is foreclosed. What kinds of life emerge in the cracks of broken plans? How do people dwell among fragments of collapse while mobilizing creativity, hope, and survival?
Through playful and reflective exercises in mapping, storytelling, object collection, and collage, we will explore how failed or incomplete designs become sites of invention. Together, we will ask what these forms of inhabiting abandoned, aborted, or derailed futures tell us about the present, and what other futures they might make possible.
Inspired by these questions, please bring a newspaper clipping, a photograph, a poem, a short piece of writing, or simply your curiosity. We will cut, draw, think, and share, reflecting on what it means to build life in the ruins of what was once imagined, and how that connects to your own questions, concerns, and creative or research practices.
Please watch this 10 min documentary from one of my research sites in Beirut, Lebanon, and read the following in preparation:
- Akar, Hiba Bou. 2018. Chapter 2: The Doubleness of Ruins. In For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers, 35-62. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Plant Companionship
(Agata Lisiak on July 3)
(Agata Lisiak on July 3)
In my ongoing work on Rosa Luxemburg's political ecology, I develop the concept of plant companionship, which I understand as the practice of noticing plant life and acknowledging it for what it is, caring for and about it, protecting and defending it, and remaining humbly open to what we do not (yet) know about it. Beyond theorizing, I have been engaging with hands-on activities related to plant companionship such as the making and distribution of seed bombs as well as embroidery. In this workshop, I invite participants to reflect on their own ways of engaging with plant life and to consider the geographies of responsibility that inform those interactions. We will then look at examples of plant embroidery and take first steps to translate what we know about specific plants into abstract or figurative patterns. In preparation, please kindly read my paper from the Journal of Visual Culture.
Lisiak, Agata. 2024. "Notes on plant companionship: from Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium to Jumana Manna’s Foragers." Journal of Visual Culture 23(2): 131-155.
