ANAFI SUMMER SCHOOL

Cultural Analysis Seminars

22 - 25 June 2025

Initiating what we hope will become a yearly gathering - one that will also expand in focus and reach from next year - members of the Greek Studies Now collective gathered in the Aegean Island of Anafi in the last week of June for the first edition of Anafi Summer School, led by Prof Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford). We worked on unpublished material and shared work in progress, while also organising exchanges with artists and academics who made invaluable guest visits.

This year's overall theme was "Approaching the Archive". The seminars spanned from a dialogic interpretation of Cavafy's undecipherable notes, to new research on Costas Taktsis and an understudied correspondence between Yannis Ritsos and his English translator Nikos Stangos.

Versions of an "imagined archive" were shared through readings of fictional postcards from the exile island of Yaros and the city of Alexandria. Panos Koutras's oeuvre and Paola Revenioti's Oleanders were seen as case studies of queer visual archives, while an "archive of hysteria" became the entry point for an analysis of the writings of Konstantinos Christomanos.

^{Orestis Tzirtzilakis presenting on Konstantinos Christomanos' The Wax Doll}

^{Dr Claudio Russello discussing his Ten Postcards from Yaros}

On the seminar's closing day we delved deeply into the visual archive of Dimitris Papaioannou, paying special attention to his graphic novels and comics. Papaioannou's own presentation of the material and his unique way of looking back on his own archive gave us unforgettable moments of performative reflection, archival ethics and aesthetics. A fascinating debate on the politics of form in art that started during Papaioannou's presentation, concluded in the best way imaginable with Maria Fakinou. She invited us into her writer's workshop, explaining why a novelist may decide to rewrite a finished novel, before reading the opening pages of the latest version of her new novel Όλα τα δέντρα.

^{Seminar with Dimitris Papaioannou}

The 2025 Anafi Summer School was generously supported by the Municipality of Anafi, who offered us the space for our gatherings, as well as Blue Star Ferries.

^{Participants of the Summer School in front of Anafi's Old School}