The place where Plato founded the Academy more than 2000 years ago is an existing lush garden in Athens, a beautiful jungle full of life that holds communities of diverse beings, myriad stories and healing knowledges. However, at present, our dear Jungle is facing a deadly threat that can end the lives of many of her inhabitants, break the bonds between her diverse communities and erase stories that hold affects and necessary knowledges.
Joining the many ongoing efforts of resistance, in this workshop, we will start creating a living archive of and with the Jungle to celebrate her. A caring companion, a breathing artefact of stories, beings and places inside Akademia Platonos that have touched us, moved us, embraced us, taught us, enlivened us. Through the process of creation, we will reflect on questions of counter-storytelling, how can our grassroots archive incorporate affects and narratives inscribed in the body(s), how can it help subvert the hegemonic narratives about culture and heritage that abuse the symbolic capital of the Jungle just for the sake of economic profit for the few, inflicting erasure and silencing on all those beings worth not profitable enough, and how can it contribute to endow the Jungle with human rights and elicit imaginations of futures otherwise.
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Isabel Gueterres Sanchez is a researcher and educator with a background in architecture, anthropology and urban sociology. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Spanish National Research Council and a visiting researcher at FAC. Her research work situates mainly across the fields of urban anthropology, critical geography and feminist political theory. Overall in her work, she is interested in practices, imaginaries and spaces of life in common and collective care within contemporary urban contexts marked by widespread processes of neoliberalisation and crisis. She is part of the Athens-based ecofeminist collective Mouries.
Drawing from the series “#LegalRights4AkadimiaPlatonosJungle” by Joulia Strauss