"Skouries. An ethnographic history-comic of mining infrastructure in northern Greece"

It's time to announce another new release from Campos Publications, which will be released in the coming months. Its title: "Skouries. An ethnographic history-comic of mining infrastructure in northern Greece" and the whole project is in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology at Vrije University (Anthropology VU Amsterdam), as part of the infra-demos project.

Script: Leonidas Oikonomakis & Dimitris Dalakoglou
Design: Apostolis Ioannou a.k.a. Kotsifas Blackbird
Graphic Design: Nicolas Kouniniotis

In 2023 the journal Globalzations will publish the special issue on 'infrastructural harm: rethinking moral entanglements, spatio-temporal dynamics, and resistance(s)' edited by Yannis Kallinaos, Alexander Dunlap and Dimiris Dalakoglou, PI of infra-demos.

This introduction provides an initial approach to the conceptual framework of infrastructural harm. It draws upon existing scholarship to discuss infrastructures as relational arrangements co-formative of harm. By approaching infrastructures as sites of ongoing socio-political and environmental antagonism, we pay attention to the ways in which infrastructural harm is generated, accretes, and transmutes across different scales and contexts. We consider harm as a process that exceeds the (in)direct consequences of infrastructure operation to extend to other arrangements. Building upon the diverse case studies discussed in this special issue, we investigate how the political and necropolitical properties of infrastructures are entangled with different technologies, judicial forms, policies, regulations and everyday processes. By foregrounding these diverse manifestations of infrastructural harm, together with its material and immaterial expressions, we expand on the existing literature in order to further explore critical codifications of contemporary socio-technical arrangements.

See full article
 

By Dimitris Dalakoglou,
Principal Investigator of infra-demos

Almost two years after its initial idea, and 16 months after the start  of fieldwork research on wind turbine industry and democracy on the island of Evia, the last film of infra-demos, titled 'Colony' by Spyros Gerousis and Dimitris Dalakoglou has been finalised and is ready to be released in a few weeks. 

During the production and the research for the three infra-demos documentary films, that deal with infrastructures and democracy in Greece, we faced various forms of harassments and threats with specific orientation. 

When something is repeated, it stops being a coincidence. Among other problems, we were subjected twice to mysterious burglaries. The first time cameras and memory cards with material were stolen. The second  burglary, occurred in the summer 2022, during this one the entire desktop computer we use for editing the film was stolen, together with the backup memory cards of the material. As it is known among film-makers, the final versions of the films are very heavy files that cannot be effectively backed up. The final edited version of the film was destroyed beyond repair the week before its final release.

This second incident was a professional job, as the apartment was broken in at a very critical moment for the entire project and as we were coordinating over the phone and private messages, sharing our worries and related information about release dates etc. The thieves, broke in while our member was asleep, stealing our expensive and sizeable film-making equipment and our invaluable material, suprispingly without waking up anyone. The incidents were reported to the Greek police with no result.  

After lots of hard work, we managed to gain back parts of the material, find equipment and re-edit this final documentary film. We did feel fear, stress, worry and desperation, but we came through these obstacles.

After five years studying  infrastructures and democracy in Greece and other European countries, we can say that  infrastructures in capitalism remain largely a profit oriented machine that does not appreciate the unblackboxing of the relationships of capitalist exploitation incorporated in their management and function. 

I have to make the statement that in the case we encounter a third burglary or any other harassment and harm, this time our final film is well backed up and all security measures for the protection of our film and our personal protection have been taken. The release of the film does not depend only on us anymore, but it will be released on the planned date, with or without us. 

infra-demos.net organised together with University of Barcelona department of Anthropology a panel in EASA biannual conference under the title 'Infrastructuring solidarity' with totally 9 papers.

The PI of infra-demos Prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou was also one of the plenary speakers of the conference in the plenary panel titled  'Shared Spaces and Common Good' where his presentation was titled 'Shared vs Commons?' 

infra-demos' PI, Prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou  will present findings of the project and will participate in the Common(ing) Struggles workshop at St Gallen University between 2nd and 4th of May.

For more information in the workshop click the link 

infra-demos' PI Dimitris Dalakoglou and its doctoral researcher Christos Giovanopoulos co-organise with Dr Roger Sansi of Barcelona University department of Anthropology the panel Infrastructuring Solidarity and the Commons: Prefigurative socio-technical articulations of a post-capitalist world Infrastructuring Solidarity and the Commons: Prefigurative socio-technical articulations of a post-capitalist world at EASA 2022 Conference in Belfast. 

The abstract fo the panel is the following: 
In the light of the 4th industrial revolution the ‘infrastructural turn’ in anthropology has effectively un-black-boxed the uneven relations of power embedded in the techno-material domains of infrastructure. At the same time, in the context of crisis and the retreat of the welfare state, examples of grassroots solidarity, mutual-aid and the commons proliferated in diverse political contexts, socio-technical settings –analogue, digital and phygital- and geographies – local, global and cosmolocal, urban or not- capturing the attention of social scientists. In this course the notion of infrastructure has been established as an analytical category to understand enabling or hindering habitats of sociality and belonging, while solidarity and the commons have been examined as prefigurative examples of hope and/in post-capital modes of social organization. In addition, inroads have been made in the ways techno-material arrangements condition human and social agency, in synch with the permeation of ubiquitous technologies and know-how in everyday life and environs.
Yet, the interaction between infrastructure, solidarity and the commons has remained mostly in the margins of those debates. While the qualities of social movements of solidarity and the commons as infrastructure that induces social change have been examined, the ways in which the qualities of solidarity and the commons effect or are wired into the techno-material domain of infrastructure has escaped attention. Alike, while the synergetic and cross-scale potential embedded in digital technologies has been approached (e.g. digital commons, platform cooperativism), the ways in which emerging, or existing, infrastructure facilitates, or hinders, solidarity and commoning remains under-studied.
Click to see the full panel with the papers to be presented