In a time of many endings – species lost to climate change, knowledge lost to colonialism, ways of being lost to capitalism- what could we learn from necromantic practices and the strange space that ghosts inhabit? Endings invite contemplation of what has passed and what the future entails. Attending to endings and inhabiting extinction stories, remind us that there is no singular ending or phenomenon of extinction; rather, extinction is experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed and narrated in a variety of ways. Situating ourselves within the era of small and bigger deaths, might serve as suture or a different kind of temporality, binding the past and the future while becoming again. Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present that persists in the shadow of mass death, a world haunted with the treat of extinction. In this poetic narration and sculptural communal making, we will examine the new landscapes that unfold from ghostly entanglements while contemplating on the narratives and practices that must be cultivated in times of multispecies urgencies. Shadowed by the possible extinction of the Akadimia Platonos jungle and the multiple destructions of Athenian public spaces in the name of regeneration and progress, this meeting calls for a discussion that focuses on finding strength through surrender, grief and the attendance of eerie estuaries that disturb the proper separation between life and death.Through mythological examples and folklorish storytelling, this meeting is an effort to unleash ourselves while unleashing a space on the verge of capitalistic occupation – with the use of natural clay extracted from the only place where Kifisos river runs free, we will imagine, create and materialise deathly pain into a sculptural lament.
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Eirini Vlavianou (b. 1994, Athens) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator and researcher. She is an associate editor of JAWS Journal, a member of the Room to Bloom community and a professor of Avtonomi Akadimia initiative. She has also participated as an artist in various group exhibitions while in 2022, she was one of the artists to receive a place in the Scientist in Residence: Making Waves, a collaboration between UAL and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. She was a 2020 ARTWORKS fellow through which she was offered the chance to work with the University of Thessaly in a speculative zine publication as well as undertake seminars by the New Centre for Research and Practice. She is currently an avid ceramics practitioner with an eager focus on traditional practices and techniques while living and working in Athens, Greece.
Photo by Eirini Vlavianou