Mêtis. The Wave in the Mind and Fugitive Planning

[…] The story is old and strange, so much so that nobody knows where the truth ends and the fantasy of the life of a match and toxicities begins. Yet what do we care about truth, us, the fugitives and deserters of the dry logic of three dimensions? We are on the hunt for the fourth one, the immaterial and elusive, the one that escapes the worldly outline of our eyes…. M. Karagatsis “The lost island”

Curated by Nadja Argyropoulou 
As part of The Institute of Anxiety’s programme  
9 September – 6 October 2019: days of study 
23 – 30 September: study peak (continuum of residencies, research walks, talks, apparitions, and presentations 
27 – 28 September: we join and extend the Global Climate Strike!

Participants (list to be extended): Spyros Anastasiou Aliferis, architects and participants of Architectural Meetings Dodecanese – Mugla, Alain Baran, Oscar Carrier-Sippy, Daniela and Linda Dostálková, Adrianos Efthymiadis, F’aman (Iria Vrettou & Ariadne Strofylla), Telis Hatzifountas, Nana Iliopoulou, Sára Jan Märcová, Anna Kamma, Eva Koťátková, Dominik Lang, Denisa Langrová, Františka Malasková, Giannis Maroullakis, Andreas Lardopoulos, Filippos Lardopoulos, Ann-Marie Lardopoulou Christensen, Elefhteria Oikononou, Anna Parliara, Sofia Glarou, Athanasia Pastrikou, Nicolas Prokop, David Přílučík, Ruta Putramentaite, Gregory Reizakis, Trond Rekstad, Jonáš Richter, Pascale Servais & Pierre Seba, Sláva Sobotovičová, Xanthi Sotiraki, David Střeleček, Iassonas Thilikos, Susan Trainor, Seva Vassilara, Tassos Vrettos, and students and pupils of Elementary and High School of Tilos Island.

Daughter of the Ocean (according to Hesiod) or child of a marriage between Erebus and Night (according to Acousilaos), Mêtis is not just the wife swallowed by her husband Zeus but a whole cosmos of thought and action, a way of knowing, as it emerged within Greek culture in its entanglement with the social and the natural. 
Conspicuous by its absence from theoretical studies and yet surviving in poetic memory, mêtis has been known as the cunning intelligence linked to the tricks of crafty Odysseus, the back-tracking of the fox, the polymorphism of the octopus, the solving of enigmas and riddles, the rhetorics of the sophists, the magic of Dionysus, the skills of the artisan, the mastery of builders and navigators, the character of the trickster, the deceiver as this is encountered in a wide variety of myths and traditions. 
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, in their work on Mêtis. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, discuss the whole gamut of operations in which such intelligence makes contact to its object combining connivance and opposition: 

“Mêtis is characterised precisely by the way it operates by continuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into their contraries objects that are not yet defined as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts but which appear as powers in a situation of confrontation and which, depending on the outcome of the combat in which they are engaged, find themselves now in one position, as victors, and now in the opposite one, as vanquished. These deities, who have the power of binding, have to be constantly on their guard in order not to be bound in their turn. Thus, when the individual who is endowed with mêtis, be he god or man, is confronted with a multiple, changing reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to seize, he can only dominate it—that is to say enclose it within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within his control—if he proves himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary. Similarly, in order to reach his goal directly, to pursue his way without deviating from it, across a world which is fluctuating and constantly oscillating from one side to another, he must himself adopt an oblique course and make his intelligence sufficiently wiley and supple to bend in every conceivable way and his gait so ‘askew’ that he can be ready to go in any direction. In other words, to use the Greek term, you could say that the task of the agkulometes one, who possesses twisting mêtis, is to devise the straightest way to achieve his end.”

Tracing mêtis within the Aegean archipelago and also in the global shifting terrain of uncertain and ambiguous situations, with the participation of creative individuals (artists, scientists, film-makers, poets, writers, curators, architects, laymen of various professions, locals and travelers) the event titled “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” will unfold at the island of Tilos within September 2019. 
Following up on “Making Oddkin. for joy, for trouble, for volcanic love”, organised at the Greek islands of Nisyros and Gyali in September 2018, this year’s event will further explore our era of a great transformation (“The Great Derangement” as per writer Amitav Gosh) from the viewpoint, the circumstance provided by a small Aegean island and the specifics tactics developed there towards a shift in current paradigms of progress. 

Tilos, the island that the novel of M. Karagatsis describes as one that has drifted from the Aegean Sea to the Tropics of the Pacific Ocean, is also the first island in the Mediterranean powered exclusively by wind and solar energy and also a place that champions sustainable development, human rights and refugee integration by supporting the cooperation of asylum-seekers and locals in the development of organic farming businesses. 

The engagement with ecology is central to this year’s event as it examines its absence from the histories of modernism, focuses on the transformative ties that ecological thinking can create across the seas and the lands, and stands by the words of Gosh, “Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. 
The bankruptcy of political systems, the failure of economic models, the devastating climate effects, the refugee crisis and the possibility, the urgency even, of a radical change imagined by alternative narratives, images and relations will be the subject of “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning”, although plants, ancient mammals, rocks, arcs, crossings, troubles and entangled stories will be the matters examined; the event, in this sense engages with fugitivity as a desire for a playing or being outside, as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed”(as per Fred Moten)

A blurring -the osmosis of art, performance, media, film, architecture, science and everyday practices will be visited as an example of the alternative, daring formations and cultural mutations that are needed in order to disrupt the hegemonic narratives and their image complex. 
The curator and organising entities invite all initiatives that work to this end locally and also include collectives, platforms and individuals that operate internationally, to join the Global Climate Strike and transmit the voice of this alliance from Tilos.

The event will attempt a further cultural jamming, along the same concerns, with the events organised by TBA21-Academy and Ocean Archive 
in Venice, as well as with symposium organised by Architectural Meetings Dodecanese – Mugla in Tilos from 28 September until 7 October.

“mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” can be understood as study, in the way described by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (“The Undercommons”): 
“We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”

Daughter of the Ocean (according to Hesiod) or child of a marriage between Erebus and Night (according to Acousilaos), Mêtis is not just the wife swallowed by her husband Zeus but a whole cosmos of thought and action, a way of knowing, as it emerged within Greek culture in its entanglement with the social and the natural. 
Conspicuous by its absence from theoretical studies and yet surviving in poetic memory, mêtis has been known as the cunning intelligence linked to the tricks of crafty Odysseus, the back-tracking of the fox, the polymorphism of the octopus, the solving of enigmas and riddles, the rhetorics of the sophists, the magic of Dionysus, the skills of the artisan, the mastery of builders and navigators, the character of the trickster, the deceiver as this is encountered in a wide variety of myths and traditions. 
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, in their work on Mêtis. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, discuss the whole gamut of operations in which such intelligence makes contact to its object combining connivance and opposition: 

“Mêtis is characterised precisely by the way it operates by continuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into their contraries objects that are not yet defined as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts but which appear as powers in a situation of confrontation and which, depending on the outcome of the combat in which they are engaged, find themselves now in one position, as victors, and now in the opposite one, as vanquished. These deities, who have the power of binding, have to be constantly on their guard in order not to be bound in their turn. Thus, when the individual who is endowed with mêtis, be he god or man, is confronted with a multiple, changing reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to seize, he can only dominate it—that is to say enclose it within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within his control—if he proves himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary. Similarly, in order to reach his goal directly, to pursue his way without deviating from it, across a world which is fluctuating and constantly oscillating from one side to another, he must himself adopt an oblique course and make his intelligence sufficiently wiley and supple to bend in every conceivable way and his gait so ‘askew’ that he can be ready to go in any direction. In other words, to use the Greek term, you could say that the task of the agkulometes one, who possesses twisting mêtis, is to devise the straightest way to achieve his end.”

Tracing mêtis within the Aegean archipelago and also in the global shifting terrain of uncertain and ambiguous situations, with the participation of creative individuals (artists, scientists, film-makers, poets, writers, curators, architects, laymen of various professions, locals and travelers) the event titled “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” will unfold at the island of Tilos within September 2019. 
Following up on “Making Oddkin. for joy, for trouble, for volcanic love”, organised at the Greek islands of Nisyros and Gyali in September 2018, this year’s event will further explore our era of a great transformation (“The Great Derangement” as per writer Amitav Gosh) from the viewpoint, the circumstance provided by a small Aegean island and the specifics tactics developed there towards a shift in current paradigms of progress. 

Tilos, the island that the novel of M. Karagatsis describes as one that has drifted from the Aegean Sea to the Tropics of the Pacific Ocean, is also the first island in the Mediterranean powered exclusively by wind and solar energy and also a place that champions sustainable development, human rights and refugee integration by supporting the cooperation of asylum-seekers and locals in the development of organic farming businesses. 

The engagement with ecology is central to this year’s event as it examines its absence from the histories of modernism, focuses on the transformative ties that ecological thinking can create across the seas and the lands, and stands by the words of Gosh, “Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. 
The bankruptcy of political systems, the failure of economic models, the devastating climate effects, the refugee crisis and the possibility, the urgency even, of a radical change imagined by alternative narratives, images and relations will be the subject of “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning”, although plants, ancient mammals, rocks, arcs, crossings, troubles and entangled stories will be the matters examined; the event, in this sense engages with fugitivity as a desire for a playing or being outside, as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed”(as per Fred Moten)

A blurring -the osmosis of art, performance, media, film, architecture, science and everyday practices will be visited as an example of the alternative, daring formations and cultural mutations that are needed in order to disrupt the hegemonic narratives and their image complex. 
The curator and organising entities invite all initiatives that work to this end locally and also include collectives, platforms and individuals that operate internationally, to join the Global Climate Strike and transmit the voice of this alliance from Tilos.

The event will attempt a further cultural jamming, along the same concerns, with the events organised by TBA21-Academy and Ocean Archive 
in Venice, as well as with symposium organised by Architectural Meetings Dodecanese – Mugla in Tilos from 28 September until 7 October.

“mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” can be understood as study, in the way described by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (“The Undercommons”): 
“We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”

Under the overall theme of “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” and in strong solidarity to global climate strike actions we raise our voices in rebellion from Tilos the remote, island of the Dodecanese within the Aegean archipelago where rare healing plants co-exist with the remains of prehistoric mammals: 

On Friday the 27th of September, we join in loud celebration the vision of young rebels around the world. We gather as a celebratory oddkin: Students and teachers, young and old, artists and field workers, scientists and travellers, musicians and shop keepers, locals and visitors we start with a strike and then make a striking procession towards the sea! Starting from the main square at Livadia we follow the young toward the port and we sing, we speak in tongues, we play music, we change our everyday moves and transform to other species, we imitate the rich noise and wild entanglements of life. We transmit, we disrupt, we demand change we make waves and start a new thread of rebellion from a small Aegean island. 
#CLIMATESTRIKE IN TILOS – LIVADIA

On Saturday the 28th of September, we gather our thoughts, our fears and ideas at the church square of Megalo Chorio, in the evening, and we carry through the late night by reading about climate justice, sharing stories of alternative routes and planning courses of action locally and beyond. We see moving images and discuss their potential to spread the message of change with social resilience and environmental sustainability. We join other friendly platforms of art and action, like TBA21-Academy which is in Venice Italy. We channel the waves and the strike continues in striking story-telling. 
#CLIMATESTRIKE IN TILOS – MEGALO CHORIO

“mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning” is dedicated to the loving memory of poet, writer, artist and visionary champion of ecology, Nanos Valaoritis (1921–2019). We stand by his legacy.

Mêtis. The Wave in the Mind and Fugitive Planning. Tilos, Greece. Photos: Tassos Vrettos. 2019

Mêtis. The Wave in the Mind and Fugitive Planning. Tilos, Greece. Photos: Tassos Vrettos. 2019

The project is organised as by Are | are-events.org as part of The Institute of Anxiety’s programme with the cooperation of the Municipality of Tilos, the Architectural Meetings Dodecanese – Mugla and many

The research team includes: Zuzana Blochová, Adéla Korbičková and Elena Stavraki 
Production: Adéla Korbičková

individuals. 

Supported by Prague City Hall, the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, the Arts and Theatre Institute.