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Center / periphery

Summary: One of the dissertation's master-binaries — and one of the ones it most carefully refuses to take at face value. The center/periphery relation is treated as a constantly shifting configuration across the four chapters: Balkan / European, Greek / Macedonian, Athens / island, EYE Filmmuseum / Pordenone Silent Film Festival, festival circuit / national cinema, Stavros Niarchos Foundation / Greek public institution, Western mainland / Aegean island, archivist / viewser.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, recurring across all four chapters; introduced explicitly in chapter 2's title ("Center-Periphery Debates").

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

In chapter 1

The Manakia statue in border-city Bitola is set against the "Skopje 2014" capital-redevelopment glyptotheque, both read as monumentalizing gestures despite their disassociation. The 1992 Thessaloniki rallies stage a Greek-national-center claim over a Macedonian periphery. EYE Filmmuseum, as a "major, central European institution," approaches the Ottoman peripheries via "Views of the Ottoman Empire" — and is structurally implicated in the very center/periphery hierarchy it is trying to soften.

In chapter 2

The center/periphery binary is restaged as "Europeanness vs Greekness" — the thessaloniki-cinema-museum was launched in 1997, the year the city was European Capital of Culture. The 2022 redesign is funded through the EU's NRRP, "channeled from the core funding bodies of the European Union to its crisis-laden periphery." The visitor-as-viewser is a peripheral figure who, through database interaction, performs a flattened center/periphery relation.

In chapter 3

The Weird Wave is read as a peripheral cinema producing itself for a Western core that "still largely stands for the idea of European cinema tout court" (Kourelou et al.). "Consenting self-exoticism" (Nikolaidou) names the move by which the periphery internalizes the center's gaze. documenta 14 in Athens is read by Tramboulis and Tzirtzilakis as a moment when the periphery's critique fell into "political metonymy."

In chapter 4

The center/periphery problem is recast as an ecological / archipelagic one. The Cyclades are an archipelago around the central Delos (sacred birthplace of Apollo and home of the Delian League treasury before its relocation to the Acropolis by Pericles). Centers, the chapter argues, keep relocating — and the centripetal structure of archipelago-network is read as a contemporary version of Pericles' move.

What Mademli does with the binary

Rather than dissolving the center/periphery distinction (which she treats as politically real), she:

  • Tracks how digital tools migrate centralizing logics into ostensibly distributed systems.
  • Treats the peripheral as a position from which "situated knowledge" (Haraway) can be claimed, but warns against "consenting self-exoticism."
  • Borrows John Law's "fractiverse" — a world of overlapping partial participations — as an alternative to a single-axis center/periphery model.
  • Reads "marbles" (plural) as the figure of a fractiverse where the center keeps switching position.