DAY 01 (09.05.2026)

(Kurtis)

Today was a steady accumulation of both food and participants: every meal there were more people and more discussion. Already thinking and ideas for making are unfolding.

The field school is inspired by The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s text begins with a simple but destabilizing scene: being seen naked by an animal. Not observing, but being exposed—caught before one can frame, name, or justify.

As we move through the environs of Kefalonia, what if these landscapes do not simply present themselves to us—but place us in a position of exposure? How does the changing context reframe the meaning of our bodies and the hierarchies and structures through which we order and make sense of our experiences? This shifts our work from observing an environment to participating within an encounter that precedes interpretation.

Moving into Day 02, we will begin shifting into fieldwork mode. The challenge is not to force these environments prematurely into familiar conceptual frameworks, but to attend to sensation before securing it as sense.

What happens when frameworks stop working? Keep an eye out for when description fails, categories don’t hold, you cannot explain what you are seeing, something feels off” or misaligned. Ask yourself: where does the landscape strip you of your ability to interpret it comfortably?

Such moments ask what if the landscape is not a passive object of study? Instead, we begin from the possibility that the world around us conditions what can be seen, limits access, and structures perception. We are not outside it, rather we are co-produced within it.

Such co-production also necessitates boundaries: we are produced through our separation from the other, while others are produced through their exclusion from yet others. Boundaries are everywhere: land/sea, fresh/salt, surface/underground, past/present. While these are inherent within the encounter, how are these encountered? Are these boundaries discovered—or produced through the way we engage them? What is at stake in the boundaries I draw, in those drawn on my behalf before I even arrive, and those that draw themselves through the imposition of my body?

Finally, the big question: Is it possible to destabilise the human condition that privileges rational sense so that something else—anything else—might emerge from experience beyond names and sense? At what point does naming become a form of reduction? What disappears when a landscape becomes a ‘site,’ an organism becomes ‘the animal,’ or an encounter becomes ‘data’?