The Caravan Project¶
Summary: A 2011 documentary-archival project by Stratis Vogiatzis and Thekla Malamou. An actual production caravan equipped to record citizens' stories and present them on-site in workshops, yurts, or — through conventional festival circuits — as standalone short films. Funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Central case of section 4.1.2 of chapter-4-crisis-ecosystems.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, section 4.1.2 (lines 3911–4074).
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
The vehicle¶
The caravan is a physical motor vehicle — a literal "moving archive." It is read by Mademli as a deliberate intertextual reference to the Soviet agit-trains of the 1920s and 1930s (Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Medvedkin), where film production, projection, and distribution were unified within a single mobile dispositif. Medvedkin's "principle on the interrelatedness between the production space and the screening place" is treated as the project's working method.
Rhizomatic, not crystalline¶
Where the-prism-gr-2011 uses Simondon's crystal as conceptual tool, The Caravan Project uses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. The project explicitly framed itself as "growing in size over time" (Daskalaki et al. 2015) — not a complete, self-contained entity but an evolving work-in-progress.
The dissertation traces the project's preferred Deleuzian metaphors to nomadology, but notes that the creators themselves preferred to talk about the rhizome.
Three properties¶
In the creators' framing, the caravan is a "transformative space" defined by three properties:
- Mobility
- Multiplicity — replacing interactivity, the project speaks of "multiplicity of social interactions."
- Permeability
The substitution of "multiplicity of social interactions" for "interactivity" is read by Mademli as a critique of the dual subject-object framing of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), proposing instead a diffused system of complementary agencies.
The Blind Fisherman¶
The project began from a narrative documentary, The Blind Fisherman (2011), about Yannis Koukoumialos. The film was circulated through festival networks and became the launchpad for the rhizomatic expansion of the story archive. The film is available on YouTube. Notably, it already touches the dissertation's later concerns — the "right to look" (Mirzoeff 2011) and archipelagic life forms.
Pedagogy and reciprocity¶
The project frames itself as educator: providing tools, training local groups in oral-history preservation, "familiarizing pupils with the concept of narrative and with the value of human stories." Mademli reads this through a Maussian frame — the project's gift of archival skills creates an obligation to reciprocate, which is a complex ethical position for the project to occupy.
Funding and platform¶
Funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (which also funded vlihi). The project uses YouTube and Vimeo for diffusion rather than building its own platform, which Mademli reads as "depriving interactivity of its critical framing" — even as the project's physical dispositif (the caravan + yurts) does interesting work.
Comparison with Prism¶
Several explicit differences with the-prism-gr-2011:
- Prism uses education to train its filming subjects; Caravan uses education on its filmed subjects.
- Prism began as an interactive online platform and produced a feature documentary as supplement; Caravan began from a feature documentary and expanded outward into a rhizome.
- Prism was self-funded; Caravan was Stavros Niarchos-funded.
- Prism built its own self-contained online platform; Caravan used mass video platforms.