Archipelago Network¶
Summary: An archival-research initiative for the Cyclades islands, founded 2019, outlined and prototyped 2019–2022, launched on field expedition in 2022. A private initiative by an American citizen living in Greece, initially funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Conducts theme-based research into "endangered audiovisual heritage and material knowledge" — boatbuilding, pottery, maritime trades, botanical biodiversity, mining. Central and longest-treated case of chapter-4-crisis-ecosystems.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, sections 4.2.1–4.2.2 (lines 4075–4373). Project website cited at https://archipelagonetwork.org.
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
Structure¶
Project-based: each location is explored in relation to specific cultural legacies. Each cycle is propelled by the lead archivist (and AN founder) in tandem with researchers and artists-in-residence of varied disciplines and nationalities. The model is "double-barreled":
- Aggregation module: researchers gather sources, trace collections, record raw material, develop metadata, supervise digitization, publish textual reports on the online platform.
- Creation module: invited artists produce new (born-)digital works — so far exclusively moving image — drawing on the digitized archive but typically exhibited offline.
Example output¶
Stonethrowers by Sofia Dona — a text-based experimental medium-length film, with limited 3D-rendered representational elements, screened in a competition section of the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival in December 2025. One memorable image: an oral testimony of a woman from the island of Serifos (which had one of the first miners' strikes in Greece in 1919) is visually accompanied by an image of a Palestinian woman throwing stones during the Second Intifada in 2001.
Why it matters to the dissertation¶
AN is the dissertation's most contemporary case study and serves as the test for whether archipelagic-thinking can be realized rather than merely invoked. The project openly addresses "crisis" (financial, ecological, pandemic) in its mission statement, and uses the Cyclades as "laboratories of field research" (after Catanese and Parikka).
The critique¶
Despite AN's rhetoric of decentralization, Mademli reads its structure as centripetal — one-directional, with consenting but limited local participation. The project is launched from the Western mainland (and ultimately from the Global North via SNF funding) into the Aegean. The name's arch- in Archipelago signals "a central axis of an 'archi,' a key origin, principle, and power." The Western myth of the Cyclades — born of Poseidon's frantic acts, with Delos as sacred center and home of the Delian League's treasury before Pericles relocated it to the Acropolis — is invoked to remind readers that treasury-centers have always migrated within Greek territory.
Scalability critique¶
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's distinction between scalability and non-scalability is the dissertation's main analytical lens here. AN, in its current form, is read as a scalability project — one that can "expand without rethinking basic elements" — operating in a country whose own history of overtourism shows what scalability does to landscape.
Metaphor vs metonymy¶
The chapter's ultimate diagnosis of AN: its ecology is metaphor, not metonymy. The island is treated as a self-enclosed model of the archive, rather than as part of a relational sea. Sean Cubitt's distinction between enclosure (hegemony) and environment (relation) is invoked to argue that AN currently performs the enclosure side. Cubitt's finite media framing — finitude rather than sustainability — is endorsed as the more emancipatory alternative.
Adjacent project¶
Digital Cyclades (https://archipelagonetwork.org/introducing-digital-cyclades/), developed in collaboration with WikiEllinisti, which also uses the "ecosystem" attribute.
Where it sits among the four chapters¶
AN is the project that closes the dissertation's argument: not because it succeeds but because it is the most recent and the most contested example of how digital archive-building can reinscribe colonial logics under the cover of "ecological thinking." The closing image of "playing marbles that can follow random, accidental trajectories" is the alternative the dissertation offers but does not claim to realize.