Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities

04/09/2026

🙏Thank you so much for this year’s amazing PSL and to everyone who helped set our ship sail!

⚓You were an incredible crew!

⏳Until the next Pelion Summer Lab...

🍉From the river to the sea

31/08/2026

⛵Following Mary F.'s travels—which we participate in and follow at the Neochori Cultural Center—comes the group “The Speculative Archaeological Museum of South Pelion”

🏛️"Welcome to the Speculative Archaeological Museum of South Pelion in Neochori, a museum that doesn’t exist because of the difficult topography of Pelion, where very few artifacts or structures have been found, but also because archaeological surveys were never conducted, a combination of social and political neglect and the persisting myth of a remote hinterland where the Centaur lives. In this speculative museum, we bring you a replica of a Pelion-type idol from Magnesia and his friends found nearby in Dimini and Sisklo, some of the most important Neolithic sites in Greece, as well as their extended relatives from Cyprus, Syria, Anatolia, Crete, and the Balkans. We invite you to use the clay we have brought, to make your own idols, to imagine what an idol from Neokhori would look like if you found one, or to make a figurine from your favorite object. This speculative museum has an Instagram account where you can learn more about the figurines, or submit your own figurines and their imagined biographies."

👉More info here: https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/psl7---team-5.html

👏Arie Amaya-Akkermans

🎞️The experiment concludes with the final group, “I Don’t Go to the Sea; the Sea Comes to Me [2026],” which created a truly exceptional documentary featuring the villagers

🌊"Eirini, Nikoleta, Nitsa, and Litsa are women from Neochori. In this short film, they talk to us about their lives, their memories, the history of the village, and their relationship with the sea."

👉More info here: https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/psl7---team-1.html

👏Nina Alexandraki (Νίνα Αλεξανδράκη), Archie Davies, Annagrazia ​Graduato, Alexandra Reza, Domenico Maria Sparaco, Caroline Stampliaka

27/08/2026

👣And while we're following group "​There Are Rivers in The Sky", the other group, "Efhorion Zine: The Planet in Neochori", takes over:

🔎Inspired by the Efhorion Zin publication and springing from the narrative premise of the “Mary F,” we invite participants into an immersive story-making game through the village of Neochori! In our speculative game we reimagine Mary F’s return to the village and, with the help of local and visiting interlocutors, co-write her route through various locations. Prompted by riddles, we ask those invited to guess the next destination on her village route, culminating in a creative writing workshop meant to open Mary F’s horizons to new future geographies and communities. Visitors will have the chance for their creative writings and collages to be incorporated into the upcoming issue of Efhorion Zin under the title “The Planet in Neochori,” a gesture of narrative and cultural continuity.

👉Here is the link of the efhorion zine:https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/uploads/6/1/6/2/6162420/efhorion_zine_web.pdf

👏Sirrah Isis Hamann, Elena Konstantina Kalle, Dimitra Karvouni, Elisávet Makridis, Genta Nishku, Caterina Stamou, and Eylem Taylan

24/08/2026

⚓On Saturday July 4, the PSL 7 cohort presented a public anti-cruise in Neochori—an experimental, site-specific alternative navigation shaped by collective research, their own geographies, and the lab’s seminars.

🪢Ravel (Group 1)
In “Ravel” group members come together to explore rope as a material that represents many aspects of ports. Ropes speak to the ties that bind us, to each other, to the earth, and to the sea. Through the recitation of a poem and the sound of a beating drum, performers invite the public to “help us hold this line”. Together, people unwind a thick rope from a spool. Through the metaphors embedded in the rope, participants are asked to contemplate rope as a means for gathering but also coming undone. The rope itself was donated to the group from a shopkeeper in Volos, whose shop was flooded in Flood Daniel. The rope still holds traces of the flood’s mud.

Nori Tsoulooucha, Müge Gedik, Fiona Hoffer, Panush Arasaretnam, Aijaz Abdul, Laya Geramizadegan

👉https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/psl7---team-2.html

🌊There Are Rivers in The Sky (Group 2)
Water melts from glacial ice and snow, bends and streams through rivers, crossing borders, obliterating walls. Freshwater—what in Spanish is called ‘sweet’—finds its way to saline. Together, they speak in brackish—salty-sweet—making communion, forging a delta. Other times, rivers pour into lakes; they evaporate only to ascend to the clouds.
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With the site-responsive proclivities of its varied crew of eight artists, movers, and thinkers from around the world, “There are rivers in the sky” meditates on the water cycle from the situated context of Neochóri–Klossoú.

Particularly, the town’s two fountains—the oldest installed in 1807—bring the cast to reflect on the recognition that a single drop of water takes 1000 years to complete its cycle around the world.

Drawing inspiration from the title from Elif Shafak’s 2024 book, this multi-sensory performance invokes the movement of water and enacts one such ‘water cycle’ by engaging participants (spect-actors) in a collective passing of saltwater brought by the crew (on foot, no less) from the Klossoú coast. Saltwater is then diluted into freshwater at Neochóri’s old Ottoman fountain. At the foot of the fountain, the participants delve into the collective listening of a Pelion-rooted soundscape together with the tasting of local olives as an enactment of the traditional utilization of saltwater for brining olives—otherwise indigestible—but also the usage of water for local agriculture.
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Inspired by both the ancient and the modern, by mutli-generational movements between mountain and sea, “There are rivers in the sky” reckons with the kinds of water-logged histories that thicken local geographies. Indeed, there are rivers in the sky, rivers that are alive, so too bearing witness to the contours of a changing world underneath.

Aris Dougas Chavarria, Sophia Hatzkios, Richard Müller, Christina Shammas, Elena GV Torres, Romane Pierlovisi, Man Po Wong, V***a Popovaite

👉https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/psl7---team-4.html

👉More for the experimet anti - cruise: https://www.pelionsummerlab.net/psl7-experiment.html

12/08/2026

✊🏾PORTS OF RESISTANCE | PORTUALI

🎥On day 5 of PSL, we screened Perla Sardella’s Portuali (2024), which follows Genoese dockworkers organizing against the shipment of military cargo through the port.

⚓The screening was followed by a conversation with Genoese dockworker and militant activist José Nivoi and Chloe Haralambous (Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University) on labour struggle, logistical disruption, war, and transnational maritime solidarity.

🏗 A discussion of the port not only as infrastructure, but as a political terrain—and of the workers who can bring its circulations to a halt.

07/08/2026

🎯In the final stretch of preparations for the PSL 7 Anti-Cruise, social and cultural geography lecturer Tom Western professional tour guide and anthropologist Tina Kontsa brought an indispensable choreographic eye to the experiment.

🗺️In the seminar with Tom, we explored anti-cartography, soundscapes, hydrological maps and stories of creative port activities, drawing inspiration from writers such as Claude Mackay, Suzanne Césaire, Predrag Matvejevic and others.

👥Tina, on the other hand, moved carefully with the groups and with each other, helped the participants to refine their projects not as isolated events, but as interconnected moments within an itinerary unfolding in Neochori.

🔍She invited the cohort to ask deceptively simple but crucial questions: Who is your audience? How will they enter the experiment? What will draw them from one intervention to the next? What will they see, hear, feel, and carry with them along the way?

🧩Through this process, the village ceased to be a mere backdrop and became an active collaborator. Paths, thresholds, gathering places, pauses, transitions, and sightlines all became part of the work.

🤝At the eleventh hour, her guidance helped transform a constellation of ambitious interventions into a coherent, confident, and inviting public experiment: choreographing not only bodies in space, but encounters, expectations, and possibilities for collective movement.

01/08/2026

🌊 In his lecture, “Art and Revolution on an Oceanic Planet,” Sharad Chari brought us into conversation with Ellen Gallagher’s multimedia artwork Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, C.L.R. James’s radical reading of Moby-Dick, Drexciya’s speculative Black aquatic worlds, and the strange, luminous figure of Pip.
Pip — the young Black cabin boy in Melville’s novel — became the center of a shared provocation. Chari’s lecture opened a submerged passage between Black radical thought, oceanic art, political geography, and ecological crisis. If ports expose the infrastructures of extraction, militarization, racial capitalism, and global circulation, Gallagher’s work and Pip’s unsettling presence ask us to attend to what moves beneath them: undercurrents of memory, revolt, grief, survival, and otherwise possibility.

🏗️In his guest lecture, “The Port as Information Space: Platforms and Power in Piraeus and Beyond,” Andreas Makris took us into the logistical worlds of Piraeus, one of Europe’s major container ports and a key node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But rather than tell a familiar story of privatization, modernization, or geopolitical “connectivity,” he asked us to follow the software, offering a crucial analytic for thinking with and against the port.

30/07/2026

28/07/2026

☠️Pirate cove swim & picnic, day 8

🏊 Afternoon before the experiment we headed down to fabled pirate cove of Klossou for a rejuvenating swim in the deep waters…

🏖️Many members of PSL cohort gave a hand with the beach cleanup organized by the Cultural, Environmental and Folklore Association of Neochori.

🧺The association Πολιτιστικός Σύλλογος Νεοχωρίου Πηλίου then treated us to a picnic with many hand-made treats in the courtyard of St. Dimitris church.

🎨Katerina Giannitsi