Thesis Supervisor: Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Thesis: The white plastic chair: Potentials For Healing of The Thessalian Plain’s Cultural Identity

July 2025

Abstract

This thesis grows out of the space in between; between a city and a village, between creativity and agriculture, between (re) imagining and remembering. It shapes and reshapes, forms and reforms, with its starting point my relationship with rural identity and my grandpa’s creativity in the Greek countryside. It started from our slow efforts to make space for each other’s creativity through saving seeds, talking about water pumpkins, language and memory. Through this process I started to question what creativity means for my grandpa. Outside of institutional definitions, what does creativity look like when it is dried gourds, forgotten jars with seeds in the falling apart garden shed, whispered recipes in regional dialect.

This piece of writing moves between personal archive and academic analysis, critique and storytelling, continually blurring their boundaries. I weave together memories, theory, images, recipes and oral stories as an attempt to present a narrative that resists neat forms of categorization. These words explore what it means when traditions are continuously moving and living things that are practiced, misunderstood, transformed and returned to. This attempt questions the romanticization found in contemporary art and its engagement with rural practices and resists the academic urge for over-contextualization to the point of running around its own tail.

This is an invitation to look again at what is reconnecting, at the garden, at the grandparents, at what is thought as forgotten. It invites you to not preserve but to give space, to start thinking about ways of transformation. How can repetition, attention, and intimacy be a meaningful, small or big, act of resistance?

Author: Alkmini Gkousiari