Architectures of Healing

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  Public Health in Crisis

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  Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

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  Machine Paralysis

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  The Mechanicos (meaning ‘machinic’ in Greek) is a folk dance performed by the sponge divers of Kalymnos island, recording the crippling effects of decompression sickness and paralysis caused by increasing industrial exploitation. Today, a disproportionate number of persons with physical impairments and debilitating conditions remain largely invisible. The writing in this book points to different experiences of movement, time, and space: Whether through the creation of a vernacular sign language; a different pacing of time and projection of futurity; exchanging forms of care around a healing spring; recording the ways in which 3 generations navigate everyday interactions through a ‘broken telephone line’ of connection; or the friendship between a woman with visual impairment and her dog, Mercy, who helps her navigate the narrow busy sidewalks of central Athens. These stories contribute to imagining a different kind of mobility.

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  Urban Lament

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  Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.