The “Para-site Manifesto” proposes the lab as a provisional, collective, site-responsive form of study: a place of experimentation, assemblage, documentation, performance, and repair.
Para-site Manifesto plate
- Document type
- Screenshot of the first page of the linked PDF from the original Dispatch entry.
- Publication
- the non-standard, Vol. 1, No. 8.
- Date
- September 28, 2025.
- Authors
- Penelope Papailias and George Mantzios.
A primer for experimental laboratories
Against extraction
The lab is conceived not as a field school that mines places for academic material, but as a space for decentring dominant histories and working across languages and minor archives.
Site-responsive
Its cosmopolitics begins from the places in which it gathers: locally accountable, yet oriented toward wider political and intellectual worlds.
Arrive as guests
Listening precedes intervention. The manifesto foregrounds the sounds, stories, rhythms, and social worlds already present in the places where the lab convenes.
Operate para-sitically
The lab works beside, with, and sometimes against formal institutions and inherited pedagogies—provisionally occupying time and space for thinking in common.
Study as refuge
It imagines collective study as a temporary refuge from surveillance, competition, institutional exhaustion, and the metrics of academic productivity.
Prototype situations
Cohorts do not simply consume a curriculum; they assemble situations, test forms of gathering, and invite others into acts of play, performance, and relation.
Blur roles
Anthropologists may become curators, performers, or producers; artists may theorize; theorists may become stagehands. Expertise is redistributed through collaboration.
Experiment as prompt
The experiment is less a finished project than an urgent invitation to collective improvisation, situated documentation, and provisional exhibition.
Convene publics
Publics are made through experimentation rather than assumed in advance. Failure remains possible—and productive—as part of what opens a situation.
Study, repair, return
The Lab’s recurring themes—from democracy and dissent to data, ecologies, and Anthropo-scenes—form pathways for continued collective inquiry and return.
Our experiments convene publics.
Pelion Summer Lab
The manifesto emerges from the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory & Experimental Humanities, founded as a place-based, transdisciplinary experiment in collective study, research-creation, and publicly engaged practice.