“[We need] multiple practices of knowing, from vernacular to official science and draw inspiration from both the arts and sciences to work across genres of observation and storytelling.”¹

On their first visit to the island of Sifnos in the summer of 1966, artist and architect Cosmas Xenakis (1925-1984), and his wife Ariadne Xenakis (1924-2015), began collecting what they termed handmade functional ceramics.² At that time domestic ceramic utensils such as cooking pots and hand-forged agricultural implements, were rapidly being discarded by the local population. With the introduction of electric stoves in the decade of the 1950s, ceramics could no longer be used for daily cooking at home. There were ninety workshops before the Second World War. By the end of the 1950s and early 1960s many of these had closed. The thirteen workshops still working today, beautifully captured in the Archipelago Network documentaries, managed to survive due to the increase in tourism since the 1980s.

The piece that follows tries to articulate one way of reading the Xenakis collection artifacts: as bodies of knowledge and experience, evidence of the intensely local intertwining and intersecting relationships between the natural world, climate, and topography, with hand-made artifacts and settlements. It tries to show the ways in which the collection reveals a human-material entanglement that can help us see these objects in new more open-ended ways. A term from anthropology, human-material entanglement helps us conceptualize both ecology and history, both nature and culture, and signals an “[approach to] research as an attentiveness to process rather than to discrete ‘research objects,’ […] that fosters an awareness of the constitutive presence of uncertainty”.³

Materials shape human worlds: in this sense there are fascinating parallels between “functional” ceramics and “traditional” or “vernacular” architecture on Sifnos, both shaped by hand utilizing only what was available locally. Commonalities between ceramics and architecture were perhaps a reason that Xenakis became enchanted with the island. We witness his architectural glance in the way in which he started documenting the collection in his notebooks with notes, sketches and measured drawings (see Figure 2).

To consider the Xenakis Collection in terms of the nature – culture entanglements that it evidences, is particularly valuable today in view of the dire global predicament of climate change, pollution, desertification, water scarcity and multiple other threats to the natural world. Especially since the second part of the twentieth century, our colossal appetite for “growth”, materials and energy, has had a result that we see “nature” only as a resource, and ourselves as somehow separate from the natural world. For a small island such as Sifnos, “growth” is particularly challenging. If the expansion of settlements and tourist facilities are not realized in a thoughtful manner, Sifnos stands to damage its cultural heritage and its fragile ecological systems that have sustained it since ancient times, irreparably.

“The collection will help us preserve the historical testimony of this culture of the everyday.”⁴

Technology arrived relatively late on this small island in the Western Cyclades. Until the mid- twentieth century, to get from one village to another or from a village to a farm, people had to walk on the hilly terrain through stone-covered paths, amongst olive trees and wild shrubs (schìnes), interspersed with sage, oregano, thyme, and in the Spring, wildflowers. The first road was constructed in 1909; it was unpaved and was primarily used by mules and carts to transport supplies. The first automobile did not appear until 1930. Electrification to the main village settlements came in 1927; you could not reach the island’s widest natural port, Vathi, by road until the early 1990s; electricity came to Vathy in 1995.

This belated introduction to twentieth century technology that started to take place in earnest as late as the Interwar period, came to a standstill due to the Second World War and the subsequent Civil War.⁵ This contributed to the island “preserving its traditional form untouched”⁶ until the decade of the 1950s. In fact, the Greek world as a whole, did not experience the onset of modernization at the same time nor in the same ways as the rest of Europe. Being part of Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire), Greece was occupied by the Ottomans following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. This meant that Greece did not have the chance to contribute to European artistic and architectural movements throughout the almost four centuries prior to Independence (with very few exceptions of artists who worked outside Greece).

During the long centuries of foreign rule –the Greek Revolution began in 1821, the modern Greek State was founded in 1833– Sifnos developed a unique architectural idiom that has largely survived to our day. Like elsewhere in the Aegean, the island was ruled by Franks (ca. 1300 – 1617) prior to the Ottomans (1617). During the Middle Ages its architecture was primarily defensive to protect it from piracy, then rampant in the Mediterranean. The oldest settlement, Kastro, was built as “clusters of houses arranged in rings or orthogonally […] to form a defensive wall.”⁷ Each house faces inwards: there were few openings to the outside of the settlement until after Greek Independence. The overall defensive structure (Kastro literally means “castle” or fortification) remains intact to this day.

Anastasia Tzakou, an important female architect in postwar Greece, wrote one of the first scholarly architectural studies of the island. Her book, Central Settlements in Sifnos. Form and Evolution of a Traditional System⁸ attributes the uniqueness and resilience of its local architectural tradition to its small size and relative geographical isolation, as well as to its quasi- autonomy during Ottoman rule. No Ottomans ever settled on Sifnos perhaps because it was too remote and piracy was widespread; tax-collectors visited once a year in nearby islands to receive dues. Tzakou credits the richness of Sifnos’s pre-modern cultural life to the presence of the School of the Archipelago, founded in 1687, a dependency of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. The School of the Archipelago contributed a great deal to Sifnos’s legacy and history: many scholars, educators, clergy, politicians, even patriarchs, as well as famous fighters for independence from the Ottomans, studied or taught here.⁹ It was also the first school to offer free higher education in Greece.

The particularities of Greece’s history as a whole and the specificity of Sifnos’s heritage — according to archaeological evidence it has been inhabited since at least 4000 BCE– have given this island a distinctive character and identity. It is this character and identity that the Xenakis family saw registered and expressed in the ceramic objects they sought to collect. How might we think about “a historical testimony of this culture of the everyday” today, and why might these objects be important to still preserve and exhibit? How could they help us imagine new ways of relating to the natural world that will be less destructive to the island’s social, ecological, and material histories?

Ceramic objects are called keramika (κεραμικά), or ageioplastika (αγγειοπλαστικά), from ageio that means vessel, and plastic that refers to plasticity or malleability. In a fascinating document sent from the Sifnos ceramicists to the Italian occupying forces asking for supplies during World War II, ceramics are referred to as «χειρο-πλαστικά», in English perhaps “shaped by plastic hands” or “shaped plastic by hand.”¹⁰ The first pottery finds in Sifnos date back to the Middle Cycladic period (2000-1500 BC). In antiquity Sifnos flourished because of its gold and silver mines, its prosperity indicated by the “Treasury of the Sifnians” that can still be found at Delphi. Herodotus refers to the “fortified city” of Sifnos, most probably present-day Kastro.¹¹

Archaeologists believe that even though remains of ancient pottery workshops have not been found yet, making ceramic utensils was often the main occupation throughout the history of this island. The earliest mention of ceramics in Sifnos in modern times, dates from the early 18th century, the writings of the French traveler Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Tournefort talked about seeing a fire-resistant ceramic cooking pot that locals called tsikàli.¹² To this day, in the local idiom, the ceramic workshops are called tsikalarià (buildings for making tsikàli pots).

Clay is a material commonly used around the world. The particularity of clay found in Sifnos since ancient times, was its ability to withstand high firing temperatures in the kiln, and therefore to render utensils such as the generic tsikali cooking pot, suitable to place over an open fire or in a wood-burning oven. The island’s favorable topography was an additional factor in ceramics production. When it rained, the gentle way the mountainsides “fold” on their way to the sea, meant that as streams of water rushed down to the coast, they helped mix the soil in such a way that it became more workable for the potters. Historically, soil was collected from certain parts of the island such as Cheronissos in the north and mixed by expert potters in the right proportions to turn into clay with fireproofing properties. Typically, two or more different kinds of soil were used. One was always a kind of dense soil (kalàgathas), that was essential in forming an object, the other a sandy soil (psachnotò), that gave it fireproofing properties. Different objects might need different soil mixtures, and sometimes soil was brought from the nearby island of Milos.

The process of gathering the right kinds of soil and making it into a workable clay for ceramic objects and utensils, was seasonal: it could only take place in mild weather, spring, summer, and autumn. It was also arduous and time consuming. After gathering quantities of all the necessary kinds of soil mostly from the North of the island, the potters would transport the soil back to the workshop on foot or with donkeys and mules and tip it into shallow outdoor tanks, called karoùtes. They would beat the sandy soil with a tree branch to break up any clumps (see Figure 3 below), sift it, and then mix it with a coarser red soil. This process took a whole day. Afterwards, the assistant potters would place clusters of this mixed material on a stone surface (malaktarià) for the master ceramicist to cut into smaller pieces (kavoùles) to be thrown on the wheel. Potters’ wheels were powered by foot pedal; after electrification came to the island, most gradually adopted electric wheels.

As we see in the video portraits about the remaining workshops, to this day, after the objects are thrown and before they are put in the kiln, they are placed on simple wooden planks resting at an angle to dry in the sun. Scholar Eleni Spathari-Begliti notes that taking ceramics to the sun to dry is specific to Sifnos: elsewhere ceramicists kept their unfired pots indoors until they dried.¹³ After the ceramics dried, and before they went into the kiln, they were covered with a pigment called bandanàs on their inside surface and were decorated with the same pigment or by etching discreet lines around the vessel’s exterior surface.

Some ceramics were only fired once (single-glazed). A second category, the double-glazed ceramics, were decorated with hand-made pigments before they were put back in the kiln. Ceramicists made their own glazes by pulverizing local materials such as quartz (agate) and lead oxide (litharge).¹⁴ Gathering shrub material to build a hot enough fire for the kilns, was another laborious task in this arid island, where there are almost no timber resources to speak of, aside from olive trees, vital for nutrition and never used as fuel. Mules and men would carry loads of shrubs and twigs until they had enough to start the firing process.

Assistants to the main potter were in charge of finding and transporting the soil (chomatades, moularades), and others for gathering branches for the kiln (kladades). Firing required extreme vigilance and experience. Preheating the kiln with fuel from branches and shrubs lasted from three to five hours. This was followed by another period of more intensive firing, a process that required constant replenishment of wood for the fire, and supervision by the person in charge. Since there were no thermometers, the quality of the final products depended entirely on the ability of the craftsmen, who had to be able to discern when each phase was complete from observation and experience.

During the initial firing the objects took on a black color. They would then begin to glow and turn red, and when ready, they would “turn white,” as they say in the local idiom. For glazed ceramics, the entire process took at least eighteen hours overall. The intricate and specialized craft of ceramics relied on apprenticeship: sons were encouraged –in older times expected– to apprentice and learn in the family workshop from the time they were young, the younger the better.

As small-scale, family-run ceramic businesses flourished between the nineteenth century and the first post-World War II decades, ceramicists started to migrate seasonally in search of new markets all over the Aegean and beyond.¹⁵ Two or three relatives or close friends would form small working groups, called sintrofiès –literally those who eat together– and travel to nearby islands that had sufficient clay deposits to work from Spring to Autumn. The sintrofiès were likely a direct continuity with the kinds of work teams that could be found all over Greece and the Balkans since medieval times. Like these, the ceramicists’ sintrofiès followed an oral code of conduct. There were no written agreements. Their way of working was distinctive for its horizontal hierarchy, where partners would share their profits equally.¹⁶ Some ceramicists moved more permanently, the most well-known being the Sifnians who settled in the neighborhood of Maroussi in Athens in the early 20th century.¹⁷

Eleni Spathari-Begleti notes an interesting facet of ceramics production in Sifnos: according to her, there was no competition in terms of ceramic artifacts’ forms or aesthetics, because forms remained the same, linked to a distant past, always responding to the needs of an agricultural society. For this reason, finished “cooking pots, water, and wine jugs, were laid out freely on the sandy beaches awaiting their buyers. There was a shared sense of security and honesty, that precluded stealing or destroying the [objects for sale].”¹⁸

“Rhythm is the most essential characteristic that unites and identifies the flower with the sea, underlining the importance of the character of material phenomena in the world.”¹⁹

[It is about] “a continuous shaping and reshaping of a specific lifeworld.”²⁰

Ceramics are nature –soil, sun, water, air, fire—that become culture: craftsmen’s hands transform the soil, shaping it with no tools except the wheel, into objects for cooking, eating, drinking, feasting, and sheltering. To study the history of ceramics on this island is to appreciate an obvious example of the collapse between the usually discreet categories, “nature” and “culture”. Immersed in the natural world, the potters embodied the landscape. As in other agricultural societies, in Sifnos the production of material civilization was intricately connected and allied with the natural rhythms of the land. The potters listened, observed, and understood when the soil was neither too wet nor too dry to dig for clay, when it would be hot enough for the planks of just-shaped pots to go in the sun.

They had a deep understanding of the rhythm of the seasons, the growth of plants, the fertility of animals and their work was directly dependent on these progressions. Similarly, giving each part of the pottery-making process the appropriate time, was essential. In the Archipelago Network video portraits, almost all the potters mention time and the importance of process in their work. For example, Yiannis Apostolidis says, “you cannot make a large artifact all at once. You need to first work on the base, wait for it to dry, then move on […] And it is a cycle. Ceramics are a cycle, like life. You might change its forms, but the process remains the same.”

There is a sense of calmness in the potters’ voices and movements. Giorgos Exylzes, a potter from Kamares, spoke of the rhythm of the potter’s wheel: “as the foot pedal goes, so does the hand”. The sound of the wheel, audible in many segments of the documentaries, helps us grasp the importance of natural rhythms, of stability, of repetition. The potters understand that “you cannot do more if you go faster,” as Antonis and his son Yiannis Atsonios mention. It is striking that in most of the portraits we hear that whereas older times were harsher, and life was a constant struggle without comforts, people seemed happier. Georgios Atsonios-Bairamis articulated this feeling in this way: “Today we seem to be in a state of panic. Always trying to catch up. I am trying to figure out, what we are running to catch up to after all?”

Almost all the potters mention the songs they sang as they worked, the music they played after work was over, the food and wine they shared. A strong sense of community, and communal ways of working were a crucial characteristic of this specific material culture. Since workshops were small family-owned businesses, families needed to work together to survive. As sons and other male family members worked on making and shaping clay, mothers and daughters helped with production, painting finished ceramics, packing them, and of course, caring and looking after the everyday lives of the entire family group.

Prior to the time of the transition from ceramic utensils to aluminum and plastic, communities also worked together to maintain and upkeep their settlements and their landscapes. Like in other Aegean islands, Sifnians had built extensive terraces to protect precious topsoil from erosion that needed to be maintained constantly and communally. Water management used to be both an individual responsibility –cisterns were and still are necessary in every single house– and a community task. Underground aquifers, surface water such as streams and natural springs, as well as rainfall were systematically managed. There were wells to pump underground water, small dams to collect surface water, open cisterns for animals to drink, and watermills near streams or waterfalls.²¹ The sense of responsibility for the care and respect of precious communal means to survive was unquestioned, and helped the island overcome so much hardship through the centuries.

Cosmas Xenakis began studying architecture in 1942 in Athens, in parallel enrolling at the School of Fine Arts. Later he studied painting with extraordinary artist and intellectual Yiannis Tsarouchis. Upon his graduation from architecture in 1948, he took part in the first postwar art exhibition in Athens. In 1954 he left for Paris with a fellowship from the French government to study new materials and technologies for buildings. He stayed there until 1956 working for various architects, including Jean Prouvè and George Candylis.²² Upon his return to Athens, he began working for the office of Constantinos Doxiadis.²³ Doxiadis (1913-1975), was a remarkable figure, a dazzling intellectual, architect, planner, author, and educator. In 1953, he founded his own office, Doxiadis Associates (DA) in Athens, gathering some of the most gifted architects, civil engineers, artists, and planners, to contribute to his growing list of commissions around the world. Xenakis worked for Doxiadis in Athens from 1956 to 1972, and then in Iraq from 1958 to 1960. From 1964 to 1965, Xenakis directed the Doxiadis Office in Madrid.

One of the ways in which Doxiadis’s practice remained unique for its time anywhere, was that it consciously cultivated an environment of learning. The DA office in Athens hosted an astonishing program of cultural activities. Associates were encouraged to actively participate and contribute to a wide range of exhibitions as well as lectures by architects, artists, writers, economists, anthropologists, politicians, and multiple scholars and intellectuals from around the world, such as the well-known Delos Symposia Doxiadis organized from 1963 to his death in 1975. In an issue of DA Review that chronicled and celebrated events by Associates around the world, we learn of an exhibition by Cosmas Xenakis at the Hilton Hotel in Athens (February 1966).²⁴

Although still not as well-known as others from his generation, art historians consider Xenakis as one of the most important artists working in postwar Greece. Besides painting, he also worked with sculpture, reliefs, theater, dance and other experimental forms.²⁵ In his work, the preoccupation with “popular” art and the everyday, is evidenced by the many studies of ordinary people, such as butchers, fruit sellers, footballers, and other characters of urban life. The interest in the everyday and the lives and art of ordinary people, was perhaps another reason why he was drawn to collect “useful” ceramics from Sifnos. Xenakis indicated his admiration if not awe of the island and its culture, following his first trip to Sifnos with his family on the summer after the Hilton Hotel exhibition. In the open letter published by Sifnaiki Foni much later to solicit old ceramics, he declared that he and his wife, Ariadne, did not consider themselves as “tourists” to Sifnos, but as “pilgrims”.²⁶ We sense that the two considered their collection less as a series of aesthetic objects than as rich but modest histories in clay.

For Xenakis, the handmade ceramic objects he discovered in Sifnos embodied generations of island life, their forms encompassing ordinary people’s habits and rhythms over the centuries. His interest in the useful aspects of these ceramics, is evidenced by the pragmatic classification he began to draft to organize the collection. In carefully designed white letter-sized sheets reminiscent of architectural specifications, Xenakis grouped the objects of the collection into five main conceptual fields (see Figure 7 below): “Household use,” “Agricultural use,” “Construction Materials,” “Maritime,” and “Various”. Each group was accompanied by a material specification such as “ceramic”, “iron” or “timber.” Each column, drawn below these groups, identified one of ten categories: name of the object [in the local idiom], material, description and dimensions, date it was made, when was it used, who made it, place, and time, where it was found and when, whether it was gifted and when. The last two categories were planned for additional observations, and finally there was space for a sketch of each object drawn roughly, with dimensions.

Although Xenakis did not leave any texts regarding his collection –at least none have been found to date—his interest in architecture, not so much as an aesthetic object but as shelter, responding to communities’ needs, is evident in the reports he wrote while working for Doxiadis. In “The Ornamentation of Settlements”, a report about the introduction of color for buildings in a new settlement in Pakistan in 1960, Xenakis spelled out how an architect should approach the construction of a house in a list of numbered paragraphs (all reports were composed in this way at Doxiadis Associates):

12. […] I make a house for your skeleton, you will fill it with experiences, sensitivities, education, just like you adorn your body and your soul, as nature gave you form. You will give form to the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the house, the neighborhood and the city will give you the right measurement / scale for this. […]

15. Without a house you will collapse. The house without you is not a house and collapses. When you enter the house, you come together. It is movement. It is stasis. It is one. It is many. Immeasurable.

26. Their clay houses cannot take color neither do they need any color.²⁷

Xenakis noted that only when a person inhabits a space does it become “meaningful” and “a Living Organism.”²⁸ The idea of shelter being a mere “skeleton” or as he writes further down in the same text, a “scaffold” for life, was also used by Dimitris Pikionis. An important influence on Xenakis, Dimitris Pikionis (1887-1968), was an architect and intellectual and a major figure in Greek cultural life. Xenakis studied architecture with Pikionis at the National Polytechnic University in Athens and remained close to him and to his family until the older architect’s death.²⁹ Pikionis was passionate about the connections between nature, landscape, and people with material artifacts in traditional societies.

He wrote with great admiration about everyday unschooled people, and of the significance of “popular” or “vernacular” architecture because of the ideal closeness they enjoy with nature, in many of his texts.³⁰ In one essay, Pikionis wrote that there was a secret language connecting “popular” [laiki] architecture with the land as well as with ancient ruins found on Greek landscapes.³¹ Contrasting “popular” [laiki] art to Art made by known artists of his time, Pikionis favored the former because of its uniquely rich bond with the natural world: “Man took nature as a teacher on his path in life”.³²

Xenakis was inspired by these ideas, contributing his own observations and experience as both an artist and architect. Another way in which Xenakis articulated the architect’s task in the text about Pakistan, was to call a house a “container” for life. Thinking of shelter and specifically of a house as a “container” is fascinating because of course conceptually, that’s precisely what the collection of “hand-made useful artifacts” were.

Whereas the ceramics were made to contain, store, and transport water, olive oil and food to nourish a household and by extension a community, we might think of a Cycladic house especially before the Second World War, also as a large-scale functional container. It was a wholly hand-made object. Built with thick walls of stone found abundantly on the island, and clay as a binding material. The ceilings were supported by narrow timber beams that were in turn covered with schist stones that held thickly laid seaweed, and when possible, volcanic soil from nearby Santorini, for insulation. The roof was painted with a lime-based whitewash, that reflected the sun, and that also gained additional rainproofing properties from pomace (residue) from local olive oil production that always went into the lime mix.

Sifnian houses were functional, organic (there are few straight lines anywhere in the village settlements), made only from what was available locally. Old island houses still have very specific qualities and textures: at night as light falls on their interiors, walls collect shadows over their irregular surfaces, at times making the space seem somehow alive, as if it has absorbed the memory of the hands that made it, imperfect, undulating, warm.

A culture grounded in the shape of everyday life is evident both in architecture and ceramics on this island. Both houses and ceramic vessels convey “plasticity” or “malleability”. After all, nothing is more malleable than clay. Anastasia Tzakou has written of the ways in which architecture in Sifnos is beautifully “planned without planners”³³ in accordance with the island topography, the seven sparkling whitewashed settlements appear like “little galaxies” spread over the hills. Particularly striking are the ways in which they form a connected system –what Doxiadis would have termed an ekistic web— its density likely stemming from more ancient defensive systems.

This architectural web epitomizes the cohesion of the island’s society. Towards the end of the 17th century as the old feudal system dating from the Franks started to weaken, more freedom and population growth brought about a great deal of building activity. The capital shifted from Kastro to Apollonia, named after Apollo, for whom it is believed there was an ancient temple at that very same location. A new middle class of potters, farmers, seamen, clergy, educators, and merchants started to develop. By the nineteenth century, this new middle class built cohesive even homogeneous settlements, still mostly intact to today, even though there are plenty of small variations between them.³⁴

The close family ties, the institution of the dowry (houses were always owned by women; men owned land), the ways of life and similarity of religious beliefs, created “an unintended aesthetic […] and a natural expression of the organic nature and unity of its component elements.”³⁵ Tzakou’s beautifully drawn plan of the island’s capital, Apollonia, (figure 8) shows a linear pathway that acts as an uphill “spine” with hundreds of steps, on either side of which are houses and churches, all roughly the same scale. Unlike other Aegean islands, there are no high walls between houses, nor clear separations between public and private spaces. Instead, there is “a smooth transfer of the functions from the interior to the exterior, from private to public life.”³⁶

Tzakou notes that the architecture of the churches is related to that of the houses. But whereas houses are literally connected with each other forming a continuous unified built environment, there is always a gap –even of only a few centimeters—between houses and churches. Most churches are just a little bigger than houses –outside settlements, they were often not much larger than a room—and they were initially private chapels. Funding a small church was the only way to attain a degree of social distinction, in a society that had no ruling class. There are still more than 300 churches and chapels all over Sifnos, either intermingled with the houses or dotted in the countryside. The only public spaces dating from the period up to Independence are church courtyards where communities met and socialized after mass services.³⁷

If architecture is a container, “useful” ceramics are also architecture as the images below start to show. On the left (Figure 9), we see the exterior of a tiny, whitewashed kiln building with a narrow entry without a door. It is about 1.70m wide, and about 2m in height, it has a thick brick vaulted roof (not so visible here) and two miniscule square openings on either side of the door. The interior space is divided in two parts horizontally with reeds like the ones visible in the entrance of the building in the photograph below.

The building acts like a large fireplace: it sits above a hollow area with the remains of plant matter to be used for firing. The square openings on either side of the door served to allow the potters to monitor the firing process and to let some heat out. This type of kiln is unique to Sifnos and to wherever Sifnians settled.³⁸ We might imagine this hyper-local building with its tiny dimensions, to have easily merited its own classification sheet in the Xenakis collection. On the right (Figure 10), we see a workshop wall that seems to have once been an opening. The Atsonios family of potters who have worked in Vathi for several generations, neatly stacked two rows of ceramic pots, twenty-eight in total, with a clay binding material, to block the opening. The pots have become a wall, an integral part of the architecture, just as the kiln building, a distinct volume, in its small scale and absolute functionality, may be thought of as a kind of large upside-down vessel, a masonry container.³⁹

It is notable that coastal workshops were only comprised of kiln buildings, one or two rooms for making ceramics or for storage. There were no facilities for potters to live there comfortably: they never became organized settlements, remaining dispersed along the coasts, in contrast to the densely organized villages inland.⁴⁰ Since there was no easy access between the inland villages and the coasts, men left to work on Mondays and returned home on Saturdays. When coasts became more easily accessible in the postwar period, the whole family would join the potters every summer: wives and children would come down to the coasts, assist in the ceramic production and also swim and relax by the sea. Women would often draw and paint on ceramics, perhaps the most extraordinary example from an older generation being Kate Lembessi, whose imaginative drawings of birds, flowers, and other natural forms, are still reproduced by the family, as we see in the Archipelago Network video portrait of the Lembessis family.

Even though ceramicists worked hard on their craft, they would never abandon their fields where they kept working when they were not in the workshops. This in turn was necessary for the centrality of their plant-based diet. Specifically, legumes, cultivated on the island have always been an omnipresent component of the local Mediterranean diet. Protein-full chickpeas, a favorite food, had a very specific preparation. Since they need to be cooked for a long time, traditionally every Saturday evening, housewives would prepare their tsikàli with chickpeas, onions, olive oil and thyme or oregano. They would secure the lid with a piece of dough and take it to the communal village oven. The family tsikàli stayed in the oven for the chickpeas to be baked slowly in the oven embers (ashes) until Sunday morning when women would collect it after church. Although there are fewer communal ovens today, the practice of baking chickpeas in a tsikàli on Saturdays to be eaten on Sundays, continues.⁴¹

As cooking utensils, ceramics were important in maintaining social cohesion. Aside from the Sunday meal, chickpeas, other plant-based foods and occasionally meat, were cooked and served in annual celebrations in honor of the Saints of the Christian Orthodox church. During the most important saints’ days, mass is followed by music and songs, where food and wine are served on a communal long table inside a “feast building”, adjacent to the chapel or church. Hosts and organizers rotated annually, in a truly communal process still practiced to this day that enhanced the internal cohesion of this island. In their video portrait, Antonis and Yiannis Atsonios stress the importance of clay for Sifnos’s cooking traditions: “food tastes different when you cook it in a clay rather than a metal pot. To drink water from a clay mug: bringing a clay mug to your lips, the feeling is different from a plastic or metal one. There is a difference.”

“Our era of human destruction has trained our eyes only on the immediate promises of power and profits. This refusal of the past, and even the present, will condemn us to continue fouling our own nests. How can we get back to the pasts we need, to see the present more clearly?”⁴²

It is vital to be able to show the Xenakis collection on Sifnos as the nucleus of a small Museum of Ceramics, a project that now has the full support of his family and of the municipal administration. Once it is installed, more people will hopefully be able to share new objects and stories of everyday life of this island. The museum will have an educational component that will be essential for the continuation of the ceramic tradition. Having the collection on show will enable locals and visitors to train their eyes as the authors of The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet anthology suggest above, differently.

As I have tried to show, “useful” ceramics contain specific cultural continuities that convey something important about life on this island. These continuities, articulated in clay, were the intersections of soil, sun, water, air, fire, and history. For Pikionis, a secret language connected these, as if they spoke with each other. Today we may expand that notion with the concept of situated knowledge. Drawn from feminist scholarship, and specifically from Donna Haraway, the term means “grounding” knowledge: “I am arguing for a view from a body, always complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”⁴³

As I have shown, on Sifnos no other element of daily life has been more important than the ground itself. Situated knowledge has to do with considering the embodied, the intimate, the stories of communities, respecting vital connections between animals, plants, minerals, and people, especially important for societies in transformation. Acknowledging multiple practices of knowing, the notion of situated knowledge can help us appreciate older histories before the simplifications of industrial production. Feminist scholars such as Haraway, Tsing, and others, have highlighted the urgency of the need “to listen to the world –empirically and imaginatively at the same time” and that this is “our only hope” in a moment of crisis and urgency.⁴⁴

Situated knowledge also gestures to reparative actions. Xenakis’s act of gathering these discarded objects suspended a moment at the very cusp of rapid change. Aiming to salvage the containers of life, in the sense of both ceramics and architecture, Xenakis’s collection indicates one such reparative action. The larger Archipelago Network project also insists on situated knowledge: in its highly sensitive video portraits, it presents ordinary people talking about their families, their communities, and their everyday lives, giving them the chance to share their stories and helping us to listen. In creating a digital archival space where we can read, listen, and watch its rich audiovisual materials, from Sifnos and other Archipelago locations within and outside Greece, it invites us to reconsider as yet unstudied human-material entanglements, both ecology and history, both nature and culture.

Since culture is always in transformation, keeping records, collecting, and archiving, is important not only so that we can better understand how these specific communities developed in time, but also because these records will help later generations ask new questions relevant to their own lives. Architecture –like ceramics—is a carrier of history. Like all “vernacular” architecture around the world, settlements on Sifnos were constructed in ways that were literally grounded on local soil only, and were closely adapted to the specific climate, weather, materials, and ways of life practiced here for centuries. Today we need to embrace local knowledge again. Those who live on the island long-term, the locals, have the right to want change. But they also need to be conscious of the damage that can ensue if changes are introduced in a thoughtless or careless manner.

Livability means not focusing exclusively on humans and their needs. Livability for future generations lies in the issue of scale: ours is no longer a time for grand projects and heroic conquests. For example, constructing a large enough port for ocean liners on Sifnos as some have been working to realize, will have enormous long-term consequences for marine life and local ecologies, even though the promise of fast profit is appealing, to be sure. If the health of our ecosystems is threatened because of extensive pollution from gigantic ships, and if every hilly patch of terrain is covered with holiday homes and oversized swimming pools in an island with little water, how will these new human-material entanglements impact the continuity of life?

All that is new is not necessarily bad. But the new needs to be grounded and to rest on a scaffold of the old so that it will be appropriate. The notion of situated knowledge is emblematic of layers of history and time. This does not mean copying the past, or worse, copying ways of being in the world that are alien and destructive to this island, especially at a moment of great and increasing environmental instability. Is it really impossible for everyday life to improve for those who live here permanently, without obliterating what is vital from the past? If we can cooperate with our environment again, rather than expect the environment to accommodate us, then perhaps there is hope.

Warm thanks to Fotini Xenakis for her time, generosity, and hospitality, and to Dimitris Xenakis. I am grateful for their agreeing to allow me to see material relating to the collection from their father’s archive. I owe a great deal of thanks to art historian Spyros Moschonas who shared his insights as well as some of his research on Xenakis’s published texts with me, to Zoe Kerameas who introduced me to the Atsonios family, as well as to Giota Pavlidou, Archivist at the Doxiadis Archives for helping me locate Xenakis’s reports. In addition, I would like to thank Jacob Moe, founder of the Archipelago Network for the invitation to contribute to this innovative and critically important project. Lastly, my deepest thanks to Daphne Kapsalis. Her thoughtful insights, rigorous attention to detail, and patience were essential in translating this text into Greek.