Crisis (the keyword)¶
Summary: The keyword of cinema-of-marbles. Not a single event but a recurring discursive mode — and a Greek word, κρίσις, that the dissertation traces back to κρίνω (to judge, to separate, to sort out). Each of the four chapters pairs a particular form of crisis with a particular archival situation; the keyword is what holds the dissertation together.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, threaded throughout; explicit etymological reading in section 4.1.1 (lines 3839–3866).
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
Etymology¶
Κρίσις (krisis) from κρίνω (krinō): to judge, to separate, to sort out. Mademli leans on Reinhart Koselleck's account of the concept: "the concept imposed choices between stark alternatives — right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death." Crisis is in this etymology already a binary operation, an archival sorting at scale.
The dissertation's wordplay between crisis and Krisis — the title under which the-prism-gr-2011 was released as a linear feature documentary — uses the K-spelling to mark this etymological return. Section 4.1.1 reads the K as a localization that anchors the project's crisis "to Greece" while gesturing at the universal procedure of judgment-and-separation that any documentary editor performs.
Crisis as metaphor¶
Koselleck reads crisis as a metaphor that permeates colloquial language and expands to politics, psychology, theology, and law. "Because of its metaphorical flexibility, the concept gains its importance." Mademli pairs this with Susan Sontag on illness-as-metaphor, where modern disease metaphors sustain a "profound disequilibrium between individual and society" and frequently lead to anti-political stances.
The four crises of the dissertation¶
Each chapter is named for a crisis:
- National crisis — the Macedonia naming dispute, the failed bilateral recognition between Greece and the newly independent FYROM in the 1990s, the eventual 2018 Prespa Agreement. (chapter-1-crisis-and-nationalism)
- Center-periphery crisis — Europeanness as cultural debt, articulated through the thessaloniki-cinema-museum and reinforced by EU Capital of Culture programming. (chapter-2-center-periphery)
- Greek government-debt crisis — 2009–2018 financial recession, EU bailouts, austerity, the 2015 referendum. (chapter-3-branding-greek-crisis)
- Ecological crisis — overtourism, pandemic, climate, the unstable ground of the Anthropocene. (chapter-4-crisis-ecosystems)
These crises are not chronological — they overlap, reinforce each other, and reuse the same archival mechanisms.
Crisis as the inheritance of the archive¶
A consistent argument across the chapters: archives are constituted by crisis. The funeral of archaeologist Manolis Andronikos in 1992 is read as a crisis-event that produced a national-archaeology discipline. The 2014 FIAF congress in Skopje is a crisis-event that produced the Manakia DVD memorabilia. The 2010 Dogtooth / Papandreou synchronicity is a crisis-event that produced the Weird Wave label.
The dissertation suggests, conversely, that escaping crisis discourse will require escaping certain kinds of archival practice — replacing the singular monumental marble with the plural decentered marbles.
Sister concepts¶
- "Archive trouble" (Dimitris Papanikolaou, 2017) — the mode of public-sphere experience in crisis-stricken Greece.
- "Archive fever" (Derrida) — the death-drive built into the preservation drive.
- "Curatorial crisis" (Roya Rastegar) — the collapse of curatorial filtering in the face of digital abundance.