Seminars

Boulouki, a travelling workshop of architects, engineers, historians, and conservationists reviving traditional building techniques, will present its work to restore the Farmstead of Markos, the humble dwelling of the last farmer-excavator who lived on the island of Delos. Much of the work is documented in a digital archive that they have created for the project, featuring oral testimonies, photographs, architectural drawings, and project reports. As part of the seminar, Boulouki members will also explore ways to design public workshops in which participants can create comics as a way of learning about the experiences of farmers who worked for archaeological excavations and the connections to the ancient past that they forged through this work.

PhD History candidate Dimitris Mitsopoulos will explore the history of sex work in interwar Salonica, situating it within the city’s transformation from a multiethnic imperial port into a nationalized urban center in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on police records, League of Nations reports, and press, his seminar will consider how prostitution was shaped by overlapping processes of refugee resettlement, wartime militarization, state management of venereal disease, and the restructuring of the urban space.

In this seminar Billie Mitsikakos (DPhil, University of Oxford) brings into dialogue the dance-theater of Dimitris Papaioannou and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to consider the traces queer bodies leave behind through movement and contact: imprints of limbs and blotched cloths that are neither disposed of nor archived in the conventional sense but nonetheless kept close in counterintuitive ways. Drawing on semiotic theory Mitsikakos asks what alternative insights into knowing and registering queer being the insistence on such remains offers and argues that such queer indexical stains disrupt dominant archival norms and radically reimagine the archive as non-authoritative, participatory, and inclusive.

Jazra Khaleed will present excerpts from Rap Divas, a documentary in progress that he is co-directing with Silvia Tsobanaki. Rap Divas follows five rappers as they try to organize a concert at the Women's Prison in Thiva. The documentary explores gender dynamics in Greek rap and the challenges that working-class women face in contemporary Greek society, while also shedding light on the intersections between the rap scene and poetic production. The screening will be followed by a poetry reading by Khaleed and a discussion.

SNFPHI and the University Seminar in Modern Greek welcome film director Yorgos Zois, who will be screening his latest film Arcadia (2024). Described as a “peculiar rumination on the hereafter” and “an unnerving and curious meditation on grief” (Variety), the film tells the story of a couple facing the grim task of recognizing the body of a loved one and trying to unearth the circumstances of her death—an endeavor that leads to encounters with the supernatural at an off-season beach bar in Marathon.