Water Remembers
A Riverside Audiowalk
Pelion Summer Lab
Volos, 2024
As a filmmaker and visual ethnographer, I contributed location sound recordings to Water Remembers, a modular, geolocated audiowalk along the Krausidonas stream in Volos.
Built from archival sources and residents’ testimonies, the project reframes the stream’s biography in the wake of the September 2023 floods, tracing human–nonhuman entanglements, industrial legacies, and local activism.
Rooted in Environmental Humanities and public anthropology, the walk invites a situated listening practice an anti-tour across the riverbanks.
About
The audiowalk grew from our response, as social anthropologists, to the traumatic experience of the September 2023 floods (Daniel and Elias), when the stream was demonized as the root of the problem. We pursued a “biography of the river” that displaces humans from the assumed center of history and foregrounds how nature, environment, and climate have histories of their own. Our interdisciplinary research—ethnographic, archival, and geoarchaeological—connects genealogies of industrial growth, capitalist extraction, and colonial modernity to practices of mass displacement and relocation of vulnerable populations into vulnerable landscapes. We also sought stories of former ecosystems, coexistence among human and more-than-human beings, and grassroots resistance to environmental violence (ecocide), to imagine more sustainable and inclusive futures for the post-deluge era.
The project belongs to the emerging interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, exploring how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to collective responses to the planetary exigencies of the climate crisis. Methodologically, it sits within public anthropology and experimental humanities, turning social research into public intervention.
Water Remembers continues the 2022 anti-tour “Decolonize the City!”—using geolocated storytelling and the collective, embodied process of the audiowalk to surface marginalized experiences and voices often erased or sidelined in dominant urban narratives.
Find out more here