Athena Lecture – Where Do We Stand? Across the Border
Author: Christina Varvia
Tags: #Parity Talks X
Blurb: followed by Q&A with Lisa Maillard, by ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE
The 2025 ATHENA Lecture took place on Tuesday, March 4, and was delivered by architect and researcher Christina Varvia. Her lecture, titled “Across the Border,” offered an invitation to question traditional notions of the body and borders and to think about alternatives based on interconnectedness and shared living spaces.
“Contemporary politics of closed borders operate with an understanding of the human body as an insular, distinct object that can be managed through biopolitical governmentality. Border apparatuses are in fact tasked to section off the body, to cut its ties and render it as something that can be dealt with through expulsion. On the flip side of this imagination feminist thinkers draw another version of the human body, one that is continuous with its environment, the lifeworld that sustains it and the creatures and living entities that form its holobiome. This lecture will introduce the feminist notion of an expanded body, a thought provocation that measures the space occupied by the human body across its lifetime. It will then ask what does this expanded body do to our politics and more specifically how does it articulate a call towards border abolition?”
Christina Varvia was trained as an architect and taught at the Architectural Association from 2018 to 2020. She was also a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court (2018) and a research fellow at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2020-2023). She is a founding member and chair of the board of Forensis, the Berlin-based association established by Forensic Architecture, as well as a co-founder and co-director of the Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIĀ). Her work on airstrikes, detention, right-wing violence, police violence, and border violence has been submitted to international courts and political forums, exhibited, and awarded internationally.