Leonidas Oikonomakis

When a wind turbine flaps its blades in China: balsa extractivism in Ecuadorian Amazonia, and the energy transition.

Lecture

Tuesday November 06^th 2026

16:00 (GMT+2)

Mezzanine, Post Graduate Room

Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly
Pedion Areos,Volos

Lecture within the framework of the course South: Space and non hegemonic paradigms of knowledge
Tutor: Iris Lykourioti

CV
Leonidas Oikonomakis is Assistant Professor of Sociology of the Global South at the University of Crete. He also teaches History of Latin American Countries at the Hellenic Open University. He holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence (EUI) and has previously been a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.  He is the author of the book Political Strategies and Social Movements in Latin America: The Zapatistas and Bolivian Cocaleros (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), the Greek translation of which was published by «ΑκυβέρνητεςΠολιτείες» under the title ΣαντονΖαπάτακαιτονΤσε; ΟιZapatistas καιοιΒολιβιανοίcocaleros(2020), as well as being a (co-)scriptwriter and researcher for Skouries: an ethnographic comic about the mining infrastructure in Chalkidiki (ΕκδόσειςτουΚάμπου, 2024). He has received funding for his research from the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (2023, VU Amsterdam), the COFUND Marie Curie Junior Research Fellowship (2018, Durham), and the NWO/Dutch Research Council (2024, VU Amsterdam).

Was It the Wind? Listening to Photographs at the Edge of the Urban

Prof. Junia Cambraia Mortimer
Thursday 05/11, 13.00
Amphitheater and ONLINE

Every photograph begins with a sound: the dry click of the shutter, which claims to close time and turn life into an archive. But the click closes nothing. In a society saturated with images, photographs lose thickness. They slide past, pile up and flatten the worlds they show. This lecture turns from looking at images to listening to them.

Drawing on Ariella Azoulay, Christina Sharpe, Tina Campt and Fred Moten, it works through three archives: a 1950s family album from Salvador, the Afro-photographic archive Zumvi, and Roberto Monte-Mór's photographs of the Amazon frontier in the 1980s. It asks who held the camera, who goes unnamed, and what we start to hear once the eye reaches its limit. Sound, cutting, clay and conversation become ways of researching the urban otherwise: seeing with rather than looking at.

Junia Cambraia Mortimer is an architect, urbanist and photographer, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Design of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. She is also a collaborating professor in the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where she taught from 2015 to 2024. In 2025–2026 she was an International Fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and in 2023 she was a visiting scholar in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2007), an Erasmus Mundus MA in European Humanities from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Université de Perpignan (2010), and a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2015), with a doctoral stay at The Cooper Union in New York under Anthony Vidler. Her work addresses extended urban-nature, the image and the archive across practical, theoretical and historiographical dimensions. She is the author of Arquiteturas do olhar (2017) and co-editor of Entre imagem e escrita: Aracy Esteve Gomes e a cidade de Salvador (2020). With Roberto Luís Monte-Mór she develops "urban-nature archives" as a sensory practice of history for rethinking extended urbanization in Brazilian Amazonia (JOVIS, 2025; Urban Studies, 2026). She leads the Laboratory of Image and Architecture Studies (LEIA/CNPq), is vice-leader of the research group "Arquivos, fontes, narrativas" (FAU-USP), and is a member of the Cosmópolis group (UFMG).

In the framework of the course EKTOS POLIS: Researching the Urban Otherwise - Wanderings across Extended Urbanisation

Image: Collage by Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá. Photographs by Roberto Monte-Mór and Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá.

An initiative to document the construction methods and oral histories surrounding the "fournario" (traditional outdoor oven), in collaboration with the Cultural and Beautification Association of Kerasiotes (Pelion).

The project involves reviving the construction of the traditional oven—a fundamental element of the folk household found in every village home. Participants in this initiative will include students from the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Aspasia Kouzoupi.

Lecture by PhD candidate Elina Letsiou on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 14:15 in Room Z, titled "Shifting Scales: From the Vessel to the Design Principle. A Close Reading of an Inquiry into the Household, Fermentation, and Microbes", as part of the course INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH, within the meeting series: PEDAGOGIES OF RESEARCH.

Description
How does a research claim travel from a cooking pot to a design principle? Starting from bell hooks’s (1990) idea that the home is a site where theory is made, this lecture presents the speaker’s recent article “The Microbe as Co-occupant” (Materia Arquitectura, 2026). The article follows milk fermentation from a Thessalian household-grocery shop to a contemporary kitchen and reads the household as a micro-infrastructure of care that we share with microbes. We then read four of its passages closely together, guided by one methodological tool: the shift of scale. A condition holds constant while its carrier changes, from vessel to furniture, to space, and to design principle. The lecture closes with the next steps of a research project in progress.

Bio
Elina Letsiou is an architect and PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, under the supervision of Zissis Kotionis. Her research reframes the household as a micro-infrastructure of care, beyond architectural typology, as an entanglement of human and more-than-human forms of life, sustained through metabolic processes and embodied care. It brings together feminist care theory, posthumanist thought, and infrastructure studies, and follows milk fermentation across three temporalities: prehistoric Pindus, transhumant pastoralism, and contemporary Thessaly. Her article “The Microbe as Co-occupant” was published in Materia Arquitectura (2026), and in the same year she presented the entry ektós schedíou (“outside the plan”) at the DDes Conference Carrots and Sticks, Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is co-editor and co-author of the volume Assemblages of Terrestrial Accommodation (FRMK Editions, 2025) and has presented her research at the international conferences ArchiBau.hr (2022) and S.ARCH (2021). She graduated with distinction from the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2012), and completed with distinction the Postgraduate Programme in Architectural Design at the University of Thessaly (2015). She is the founder of L2 studio, an architectural practice based in Larissa and Thessaloniki

As part of the course "Architectural Technology – Building Construction 1", student projects developed during the winter semester—focusing on casting as a fundamental construction process are being exhibited in the exhibition space of the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly.

Monday 05/10/2026 18:00-20:00

The lecture will be about practices of threshold spaces in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. Tan will present her documentaries about the spatial production of Palestine, seed archives, alternative pedagogical activities between 2014 and 2023, and field research on Palestinian modernist architectural heritage.

The lecture will take place in the framework of the course: CRITICAL APPROACHES IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AND DESIGN| RECONSTRUCTIONS: GAZA (Instructor: P. Phokaides, Ass. Prof. Dept. of Arch, UTh)

Short bio:
Pelin Tan is a sociologist, researcher, and head of the Cultural Studies graduate program of Batman University, based in Mardin, Turkiye. She was the 6th recipient of the Keith Haring Art&Activism fellowship at Bard College, 2019–2020, NYC. Tan is a member of the curatorial board of IBA Stuttgart 2027, the research network steering committee of the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, 2025–2027, and co-curator of Urgent Pedagogies (IASPIS). Tan was a visiting professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Design (2016), the Architecture Faculty of the University of Cyprus (2018), and the Orient Institute in Beirut, Lebanon. She leads research on the threshold infrastructure of the Culture of Assembly, at the Luxembourg University’s Architecture Faculty; and Landscapes As Archives, a spatial research on the region of the Tigris River in Iraq. Her books include, Forms of Non-Belonging, e-flux books/Sternberg, 2026. Unconditional Hospitality –Threshold Architecture, dpr-barcelona, 2027.

Download the poster.

Zoom link.

Associate Professor Ioanna Symeonidou of the Department of Architecture has won First Prize in the International Competition for design and construction using 3D concrete printing with a robotic arm. The prize includes the implementation of the project, which is scheduled to be completed in November 2026 in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

As part of the Greenfield Residency 2026, the company VERTICO is giving 10 students from the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly the opportunity to participate in the construction under Ms. Symeonidou’s supervision and receive training in robotic arms and 3D concrete printing. The students will have access to the machinery at VERTICO's factory for one week.

Ms. Symeonidou will coordinate the student team, and an informational meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in Room D at 19:00. The students selected for the team traveling to the Netherlands in November will participate in weekly meetings to finalize the construction drawings and code for the robot. A key requirement for participating in the robotic construction team is prior experience with Grasshopper3D and/or 3D printing slicing software. Upon applying, submit a two-page PDF featuring sample work related to the above.

Interested applicants are invited to fill out the form by September 21. Grade Point Average, specifically grades in digital media courses, and the submitted sample of work will be taken into account.

PELION CHORA

Presentation of Student Work & Book Vernissage

According to myth, the Giants Otus and Ephialtes piled mountains on top of one another in an attempt to reach the gods on Mount Olympus, creating Mount Pelion as a natural “stairway” to the sky. In another account, Pelion was the summer residence of the gods—a place of transition and coexistence between different worlds. Between these two myths—of ascent, claiming territory, and hybrid inhabitation—the course poses its central question: what are the present and future of mountainous territories and, more broadly, of peripheral places? How do mountains, islands, and villages experience processes of urban transformation? How are they affected by the climate and economic crises? And how can we, as architects and urbanists, respond to these challenges?

To mark the conclusion of the course Pelion Chora: Untangling and Reweaving a Mountain, we invite you to a presentation of the students’ work and to the vernissage of the book PELION CHORA, which brings together the work and research developed throughout the course.

For our final gathering, we present the projects, leaf through the book, and “untangle once again” the mountain we collectively constructed over the course of the semester.

As part of the course
PELION CHORA: Untangling and Reweaving a Mountain
by The Countryside Observatory

Tutor: Metaxia Markaki

COST Action CA23145 – CitySenZ
Architectural and Urban Ambiances of European Cities
Call for Participation
Sensing Kypseli – Urban Polyphonies and Relational Architectures
28–30 November 2026
Kypseli Municipal Market, Athens

The COST Action CA23145 CitySenZ – Architectural and Urban Ambiances of European Cities, coordinated by Lusófona University and funded by the European Union, is organizing the workshop “Sensing Kypseli – Urban Polyphonies and Relational Architectures” at the Kypseli Municipal Market (Δημοτική Αγορά Κυψέλης – ΔΑΚ), a vibrant social and cultural hub at the heart of the neighbourhood.

The workshop programme and activities are developed and coordinated with the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, the Sustainable Design of the Built Environment Laboratory (Εργαστήριο Αειφόρου Σχεδιασμού του Δομημένου Περιβάλλοντος), and the AAU-CRESSON Laboratory, Grenoble School of Architecture – Université Grenoble Alpes.

The workshop invites participants to explore urban ambiances and public space through the sensory, environmental and relational dimensions of Kypseli, one of Athens’ most vibrant neighbourhoods. Through sound recordings, environmental measurements, photography, interviews, drawings and collective observations, researchers, practitioners, students and local inhabitants will investigate how urban ambiances emerge from the relations and interactions between people, places, objects, infrastructures, environmental conditions and other living beings. The workshop encourages more-than-human and relational approaches to understanding how public spaces are experienced, negotiated and collectively shaped.

Researchers, architects, artists, planners, practitioners, students, early-career researchers and local inhabitants are warmly invited to participate.

See the poster.