THEME |
Ports are planetary fault lines. Across the globe, they concentrate some of today’s most urgent struggles over financialized and platform capitalism, militarization and war, the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, migration and border regimes, labor precarity, overtourism and hyperconsumption, energy circulation, and climate collapse.
The 7th Pelion Summer Lab will examine how ports operate as infrastructures of extraction, securitization, and land-sea reconfiguration, while also constituting archives of ecological violence, solidarity and protest and thus sites where alternative political, economic and ecological futures continue to surface. This year’s title The Planet in the Port nods to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s distinction between “Earth,” the human world of politics, and “Planet,” the geophysical force whose deep-time processes exceed anthropocentric history and unsettle humans’ apparent mastery over ecosystems. Increasingly, it is not only climate breakdown events—extreme weather, intensified sediment flows, turbulent hydrological currents—but also grassroots movements, radical thought and acts of refusal that challenge fantasies of control and interrupt the smooth functioning of supply chains. From dockworker refusals and port blockades in Piraeus, Marseille-Fos, and Oakland opposing arms shipments to Gaza, to solidarity protests in Syros and Calais against military tourism and migrant detention, ports have become key sites of anti-war and anti-border struggle. Environmental movements have likewise mobilized at waterfronts—from coal blockades in Newcastle to resistance against cruise expansion in Barcelona, dredging in Kerala and Brisbane and, here in Volos, to the proposed construction of an LNG terminal in the Pagasetic Gulf. In the twenty-first-century, ports have become platforms where logistics merge with surveillance, metabolizing energy and data, functioning as both hub and chokepoint. The same computational gaze that tracks containers monitors people—migrants, seafarers, dockworkers—disciplining movement and access. Undercurrents run beneath the surface of contemporary circulation: shadow cartographies and submerged histories of depth and opacity, undersea cables and shipwreck corridors, mass graves and watery crypts: an abyss where the management of mobility becomes lethal and history sinks without disappearing. Ports carry forward older genealogies of the maritime complex in which human life was rendered cargo: the slave ship, the hold, the barracoon—and the afterlives of these forms in contemporary regimes of detention, deportation and abandonment. Against this bleak backdrop, we turn to the local maritime histories of Neochori and South Pelion—their small harbors, sailors’ routes, songs, and memories—to ask how the port might also be understood as a site of refuge, rhizomatic maritime connections and more-than-human coastal worlds. The Planet in the Port approaches this port assemblage through the experimental humanities: a transdisciplinary mode of inquiry that thinks with infrastructures, coastlines, images, sounds, and movements. Interfacing decolonial ecology and black geographies, amphibious anthropology and the oceanic turn, racial capitalism and tidalectics, critical logistics and platform studies, migration and mobility studies, we will collaborate across disciplines, genres and methods. Over ten days we will engage in collective readings and seminar discussion alongside artistic workshops, film screenings and sonic performances, dispatches from activists and site-responsive experiments at ports of varying scales along the Aegean sea and Pagasetic gulf coasts. Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly) George Mantzios (Mount Royal University, Calgary) |
SCHEDULE
EXPERIMENT |
Anti - cruiseAt the end of the lab, on the afternoon of Saturday July 4, the PSL 7 cohort will present a public anti-cruise in Neochori—an experimental, site-responsive alternative navigation shaped by their collective research, their own geographies, and the lab’s methodological seminars. Rather than a conventional tour, the anti-cruise reworks the consumptive and top-down logic of “guiding” by critically engaging the audience as participants in problematizing the histories, infrastructures, and contested meanings of ports in Greece and around the world. Unfolding across multiple locations in and around the village, the event will be interactive and multimodal. Music, soundscapes, and archival audio-visual material may be incorporated, turning the village paths into a live performance space. The public will be invited to contribute their own stories and perspectives.
The anti-cruise will aim to trace the undercurrents of port worlds: the hidden forces, counter-archives, and counter-movements that run beneath official narratives of circulation. These might include sonic traces and undercartographies, informal infrastructures, pirate logics, maroonage and fugitivity, dockworker slowdowns and strikes, flotillas and waterfront protests—pulses, leakages, and refusals through which planetary circulation is not only routed but contested, strained, and at times redirected. This action builds on an evolving anti-tour methodology developed over the past five years in Volos and Pelion by PSL and at the University of Thessaly under the direction of Penelope Papailias, including projects such as Echo/locations: Soundwalks in Makrinitsa, Decolonize this City!, The Water Remembers. In each iteration, the anti-tour experiments with public space as a site of collective research, critical storytelling, and shared improvisation. This year’s experiment will be led by academic program coordinators Penelope Papailias and George Mantzios with contributions from Tom Western, Pantelis Probonas and Konstantina Konsta. |
CO-ORGANIΖED WITH THE SUPPORT OF
