FFF6 | The Pamphilos Conversations

Submarine Horizon

At the heart of “Submarine Horizon” is a Greek apophthegm by Socrates, which Raqs heard: “To help understand Heraclitus, you need the diver from Delos island.”

The key idea is to think aloud on what changes when one dives deep – into the sea, into thought, into life. They learnt that, in Greek, the word for feeling dizzy from drinking wine (“methi”) is also used for describing the dizziness caused by diving. Indeed, the horizon of consciousness and thought gets remade after each dive.

Participants:
Gianna Giamarelou, gestalt therapist; Ribwar Qobadi, a poet who swims in more than one language (Greek, Kurdish and Farsi); and two divers, Thanasis Chronopoulos and Alexandros Sotiriou (who is also a marine researcher, and was involved as technical director in the Antikythera Submarine Excavation).

Decompression

The everyday acts of walking, sharing space and resources, and eating together make up the life-stuff of every city in the world. Undertaking them is like the decompression one needs to go through while coming up to the surface after a deep dive. The way in which a city treats the stranger who walks in, looks for help or feels hungry, defines the way in which it feels at home with itself. How can these acts that we often take for granted constitute the almost forgotten ancient goddess “Metis” – a wisdom and a cunning – for living in extraordinary yet ordinary times?

Participants:
Yota Passia, an architect and researcher who looks at cities as zones of affordances; George Papanikolaou, a doctor and medical researcher actively involved in the P2P movement; and Mahboubeh Tavakoli, an Iranian immigrant in Athens who founded and runs a kitchen feeding and nourishing immigrants who do not have the resources to sustain themselves.

Current

How does one swim for and against a strong current? Can this be taken as metaphor for the ways in which people orient themselves towards the presence of strong forces? How do they find themselves moving, taken by the current, or standing with a crowd, and immersed in a chorus of voices and feelings?

Participants:
Eirini Koumparouli, researcher, architect, and actress; Nicholas Anastasοpoulos, an architect and urbanist with a special interest in structures designed for mobility, such as ports and airports, who works between Greece and South America; Argyro Chioti, director with a special interest in the dramatic role and narrative function of the chorus in theater.

Wave

Does history have a sound? Can it be heard if one trains the ear to listen to time? What languages do our days and nights speak in? What happens when one kind of sound dies and fades away, and another asks to be heard? What are the sounds of reciprocity and companionship, of the echoing and resonance of acts that reconstitute society?

Participants:
Manolis Manousakis, a sound artist, will be in conversation with Dimosthenis Papamarkos, writer/screenwriter with an interest in the myths of life and death, and Nikos Agapakis, a teacher working with migrants taking classes in Greek at a self-organized night school.

Buoyancy

No one can learn how to dive without learning how to stay afloat. What are the factors that keep people alive and kicking, that heal and restore, and bind people to each other? Is it the way in which spoken and unspoken thoughts, or even gestures, and a spreading network of acts rise to the surface of solidarity and reciprocity from the depths of a crisis, turning into generalized sources of survival– like lifeboats buoyant on the waves of the sea?

Participants:
Polixeni Papalexi, pharmacist at the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Elliniko, who is active in the recycling of medical and pharmacological resources, especially for the neo-migrant community in Athens; Alexandros Kioupkiolis, political scientist and theorist of the commons at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; and Thomas Tsalapatis, a poet who has a vision of poetry as the space where new ways of handling language are produced, especially in times of crisis.

Gianna Giamarelou

Thanasis Chronopoulos

Thanasis Chronopoulos (b. 1976) works as a dive trainer and professional diver in different locations in Greece, from 2001 to this day. The archeological expedition in Antikythera is one of the missions where he participated. He holds several diving certifications: the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme (ADAS), a professional divers’ certification, a state professional diver license, an EANX IANTD instructor trainer certification, and a CMAS trainer certification.

Ribwar Qobadi

Ribwar Qobadi is a translator and poet, and founder of the Farzad Kamangar School in Athens.

Alexandros Sotiriou

Manolis Manousakis

Dimosthenis Papamarkos

Nikos Agapakis

Nikos Agapakis (1964, Kallithea, Athens) experienced social isolation, domestic violence, and child labor from an early age. He did move forward, even though he never managed to become the educator (Greek language teacher) he wished to be. He always enjoyed traveling and meeting people. He only achieved to do that later in life, through his participation in solidarity structures and activities: He did volunteer work for the detention center of Amygdaleza and he was at the gates of Piraeus in 2015, when the first wave of refugees arrived. He also volunteered for the Refugee Accommodation Center in Amygdaleza since the first years of the financial criss, and for the Piraeus Open School for the Immigrants for the last ten years. In his view, this is the kind of social education that isn’t self-promoted as the sole source of expertise but fosters interaction and respect to difference through Greek language acquisition.

Eirini Koumparouli

Nicholas Anastasopoulos

Argyro Chioti

Argyro Chioti was born in Athens. She works as a stage director and actress in Greece and in France. In 2005, she co-founded the theater group VASISTAS. She is in search of stage forms that are akin to poetry and are distinguished by intense danceability and physicality, often creating works resembling musical choreographies in the present tense, which focus on the human and the human existence in a social group. In 2000, she graduated as an actress from the Greek theater school “Morfes,” which was part of the “Embros” theater. She holds a degree in Theater Studies and an MA degree in Stage Direction and Dramaturgy from the Université de Provence in France (2006). In 2013, she received the “Eleftheria Sapountzi” award for her artistic work.

George Papanikolaou

Yota Passia

Yota Passia is an architect MSc, PhD-c and design theorist, currently working on a field-based approach to map cities and monitor their metabolism. She currently tutors in undergraduate design studios and postgraduate studios focusing on “research through design” methodologies. She is co-partner at studioentropia, an architecture and research practice in Athens, Greece, since 2007. The studio has participated in documenta14 with ‘Hecate’, a large-scale installation that maps the intensive visual field of the city’s layout, and has been shortlisted for Superscape 2018, a biannual award for projects that speculate on the cities of the future.

Mahboubeh Tavakoli

Mahboubeh Tavakoli comes from Iran and is 34 years old. She graduated from an art school in Iran and is a political refugee in Greece. She is a member of the (NGO) Melissa Network, for about 3 years, where her activities include workshops on poetry, art therapy, Greek and English courses, cooking festivals, filmmaking, business. She’s also having theatre courses and activities in the field of photography and the discovery of Athens. She loves to help people. Mahboubeh cooks for homeless people and she really enjoys doing it. She’s cooking for about a year and half in a girls' shelter under the supervision of the House Project and Melissa Network. She introduced herself to Melissa Network for the cooking festival on the day of refugees. In this way she introduces her country and culture, while this is a way for her to communicate with the people from Greece and other countries. She struggled very hard in her country and even on her way to Greece, but now here in Greece she feels safe. And her aim with all these activities is to be able, with more knowledge and thought (women's strength and endurance) to show to societies that make women worthless and victims of lust, that women who do not believe in themselves can develop self-confidence. She loves the Greek State, which is historical and a beautiful inspiration for the women’s liberation.

Polixeni Papalexi

Polixeni Papalexi studied Pharmaceutics at Bologna University and worked as a pharmacist in Trento for a decade. She has also taught Chemistry and Applied Arts Technology at Trento’s Istituto d’arte. She returned to Greece in 1988 and worked as a freelancer in a pharmacy until her retirement age. Since 2015, she volunteers for the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helleniko (www.mkiellinikou.org/en), in an attempt to support all those people who cannot access the basic and obvious right to health and medicine during this ten-year crisis.

Alexandros Kioupkiolis

Alexandros Kioupkiolis (BA Athens, MA Essex, DPhil Oxford) is a political theorist, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Political Theory at the School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His research interests are focused on radical democracy, the commons, social movements, and the philosophy of freedom. He is directing an ERC CoG project on these topics (Heteropolitics, 2017-2020) and has published numerous relevant books and papers, including the monograph “Freedom after the critique of foundations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the collective volume “Radical democracy and collective movements today” (Ashgate, 2014). His new monograph is entitled “The Common and Counter-hegemonic Politics” (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Thomas Tsalapatis