Floodmarks

Speculative Ethnography for Postdiluvian Futures

Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly and Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities)

Against the impetus to eradicate or not-look-at the omnipresent traces of the double flood event that devastated the city of Volos in September 2023, anthropology and architecture students at the University of Thessaly will engage in a creative-critical mission of documenting mud heaps, flotsam, ghostly water marks on walls, exposed cobblestones, personal barricades, archived sound and image, mangled pipes, wires, railings, and their entanglement with people, animals and plants living, dying and struggling in historic and new zones of environmental degradation. With these uncanny signs, they will try to imagine alternative modes of repair and inhabiting a world in common, countering the imperative to get back to ‘business as usual’ while building ever higher bulwarks to ‘fight’ the floods to come. The resulting audiovisual and textual corpus will evolve into a zine publication and installations to be presented at an experimental exhibition in Volos in spring 2025, featuring participatory sessions with the public.

This workshop and exhibition will draw on the methodologies developed during the 2020 SNFPHI workshop “Extra-Terrestrial Ethnographies of the Future-Present”, a collaboration between the University of Thessaly’s Greek Future Archive of Socialities Under Quarantine, the Athens Zine Bibliotheque and the Anthrobombing platform, which led to the publication of a collaborative zine reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of an alien future.