‘A Certain Kind of Freedom’ is a one-of-a-kind, site-dependent and site-specific performance revolving around the performer’s (i.e., the author’s) walking/drifting body as the centre of all action; from there stem composed noise, light, historical accounts, and other media/tactics. The proposed method is mixed – in that it has many different aspects – and hybrid – in that it culminates in a complex phenomenological experience that cannot be fully accounted for through examination of its integral parts.

Scouting Expedition

The author visited the area several months before the scheduled performance to explore the landscape and investigate possibilities. He walked, drifted, and visited several different locations in the broader area, including forests, towns, monuments, the cave that hosted the DSE hospital during the last phase of the Civil War, the house of the General Secretary of KKE during the last phases of the Civil War (see Historical Background), several spots by the lakes, and other places. He then drifted the Great Prespa Lake by boat and visited the exact location where the three sovereign countries (Albania, Greece, North Macedonia) meet while recording underwater sounds and surveying the birds of the lake. He talked with locals, conducted radio recordings, kept notes and sketched poetry. This trip provided the author with ample information as well as a very concrete experience of being-in-the-field; the importance of the latter in general and in the author’s work in particular is discussed in (Koutsomichalis 2022). Below are extracts from the author’s notebook, and there are photos from this expedition both above and below. 

Personal Recollections

In this endeavour, the author relies heavily on his own personal recollections and employs both narratives and physical artefacts that stem from these. The author did his military service – still obligatory in Greece – in the armoured corps in Thrace, near the border shared with Turkey, under very difficult conditions. In addition to extreme sleep deprivation and intense cold (with temperatures as low as -20°C), there were frequent shortages of heat and warm water and occasional shortages of food, bedbug infestations, demands and duties that seemed largely irrational to him, emotional angst, psychological discomfort, and occasional hazing. The author wears one of his original military outfits from those days during the performance. This uniform, then, is a carrier of all those memories, and wearing it has a twofold function. On one hand, it poetically re-introduces a material that physically and symbolically retains the memory of some kind of military hardship (of course of a very different kind and on a completely different scale than that of an actual warfare experience) so as to somehow evoke an army experience. On the other, being directly in contact with the author’s flesh, the uniform becomes a quasi-spiritual/quasi-material apparatus for his own sense-making. A way for him to connect with, and to make sense of, (difficult) history as it is shaped through myth, politics, collective memory or collective oblivion, trans-generational trauma, and the alleged national conciseness.

Flora, Fauna, Political Geography

The Prespa Lake area did not really survive the Civil War trauma (see Historical Background), and it has scarcely been inhabited since. The area is a system of two lakes separated by an isthmus. The Great Prespa Lake is divided between Albania, Greece and North Macedonia, while the Lesser Prespa Lake is mostly within Greece and features the Ag. Achillios island. These two lakes are the highest tectonic lakes in the Balkan region. For many years, the Greek part was an underpopulated, militarily sensitive area that no outsider could visit without special permission. An informal ‘war of symbols’ still takes place in the region between the Greek Communist Party, local/national authorities, and right-wing organizations installing monuments to commemorate different aspects of the history of the place. It nevertheless remains a vibrant wildlife habitat rich in vegetation, forests, and wild mammals, and it has been officially declared a transnational reserve. The Lesser Prespa Lake in particular is home to a variety of species of birds, frogs, toads, reptiles, and fish.

According to the Society for the Protection of Prespa, Prespa has the world’s largest Dalmatian pelican colony: about 15% of the estimated global breeding population live there. It also hosts the other pelican species found in Europe: the great white pelican. Pelicans aside, Prespa is also home to various species of heron (black-crowned night heron, grey heron, purple heron, little bittern, squacco heron, little egret, great egret), and to glossy ibis, pygmy cormorant, ferruginous ducks, and some genetically isolated populations of goosander and greylag geese. It is estimated that a total of 40 000 birds live in the two lakes in the winter. The Prespa basin has significant populations of wolves, bears, deer and wild boars, as well as a smaller number of chamois, Balkan lynx, and European Jackal. Prespa’s dwarf cattle is a shorthorn cow breed particularly adapted to the region. The fish fauna is one of the most important aspects of Prespa's biodiversity, with 23 species of fish recorded in the two lakes, nine of which are endemic to Prespa and a few of which have been declared endangered species. The Prespa lakes are also home to an exceptional bat diversity, with at least 26 different species that represent almost 65% of the number of bat species occurring in Europe. Prespa fauna also includes several species of frogs, toads, newts and the fire salamander, as well as 20 species of reptiles. Regarding flora, Prespa has many different kinds of habitats hosting almost 2000 species and subspecies of plants, many of which are endemic (Strid 2020).

Background

‘A Certain Kind of Freedom’ relates to multidisciplinary theory and practice in arts, archaeology, the study of the recent and ‘difficult’ past, soundwalking/media-walking, and non-representational methods. It draws on and builds upon prior research by the author, most significantly on ‘Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene’ (Koutsomichalis 2021), in which the creative juxtaposition of wildlife and the physical with the political/historical is studied in depth and apropos artistic research. The former is an art/archaeology endeavour employing peripatetic practices and a wide array of media and tactics of inquiry or of aesthetic expression in order to foreground the contemporaneity of the ruins of ancient Messene (Greece). On this continuum, the ruins are foregrounded as (a) a place that is still practised sociopolitically to generate (convenient) cultural and historical content, and (b) as a vibrant habitat hosting numerous more-than-human species, energies and phenomena. ‘Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene’ draws on the broad traditions of archaeological ‘media walks’, performative archaeology, and ‘punk’ archaeology.

In contemporary archaeological research, one encounters a wide array of performance tactics that are concerned with the simultaneous re-enactment of things, events, and emotions belonging to different temporalities; that is, with ways in which material remnants of the (more or less distant) past can become the stage of a polychronic and sensorial theatre. ‘Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene’ aims at an experience of exactly that kind. This is predominantly achieved, inter alia, through walking, technological mediation, and zooming in on environmental as well as in composed sound. The importance of walking, listening to environmental sounds, and of composed audio overlays is underscored in several other projects, such as e.g. Cardiff's peripatetic video walks in Crete (Witmore 2004). 

According to (Witmore 2006), sound is generally excluded from archaeological inquiry as a relevant category due to modernists’ notions of space-time that give priority to seeing over listening. They argue that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human beings, as well as to more contemporary notions of time where events quite distant in a linear temporality can be neared through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation. That is to say that audio can become a powerful device to achieve exactly the kind of multi-temporal experiences around which ‘Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene’ (and ‘A Certain Kind Of Freedom’) revolve.

Walking places of historical significance and surveying the material remnants of other times is a very old tradition that both predates and has co-formulated formal archaeological practice. Pausanias is famous for his extensive work describing his walks and first-person observations in 2nd c. BCE Greece. More than a millennium later, Cyriac of Ancona extensively walked Greek and Roman antiquities, delivering complex accounts thereof in which historical fatalism intertwines with impressions, personal sense-making, poetry, and spirituality (Siniossoglou 2016). Several romantic European travellers (and/or colonialists) walk ruins across the Greek countryside  (Constantine 2011) seeking knowledge, material artefacts for their collections, or sensuous experiences. Archaeology as a formal field of inquiry owes a lot to the former, and thus to walking as an epistemic strategy.

The latter is true not only for archaeology but for many different fields of study in the humanities, social sciences, arts, and more. The collective volume (Ingold 2008) surveys many different approaches to walking as an epistemic tactic, mainly in ethnographic and anthropological contexts. Walking is very often encountered in methodological perspectives for the production of non-representational kinds of knowledge and in contexts such as e.g. ‘ambulatory sociology’ (Back 2012), spatial-cultural theory (Wylie 2005), 'transmaterial walking' (Springgay 2017a) (Springgay 2017b), or speculative feminism (Taylor 2020). Several (but not all) of those practices are inspired by the situationist concept of dérive, that is, of improvised, intuitive or haphazard strolling through a place in the absence of a proper locus and in order to capture its overall ‘psychogeography’. The scope of dérive – or drifting, as it is often translated in English – has expanded significantly, and artists and dedicated psychogeographists regularly ‘drift’ in order to explore or perform with a given place in a more or less improvised and more or less poetic fashion; for a few examples see (Bassett 2004) (Herber 2009) (Smith 2010).

Soundwalking practices deserve a special mention. They broadly concern walking while actively listening in a wide variety of fashions and in various contexts (Behrendt 2018). Soundwalks come in many different flavours; for instance, Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene features technological probes to make electromagnetic fields, radioactivity, and underwater sounds available to the senses and also employs narration and formal talk, ‘tactical’ silence, interviews, and abstract sound synthesis. Other approaches pivot on ‘sonic drifting’ (Chattopadhyay 2013); education (Reyes 2012) (Koutsomichalis 2024 - forthcoming); urban planning (Yong Jeon 2013); or GPS and networking (Uimonen 2011).

Returning to (interdisciplinary) archaeological practice, punk archaeology is concerned with forms of archaeology that are inherently ‘guerrilla’; that is, archaeology that is improvised, noisy, occasionally haphazard and inspired by punk, anarchism, political activism, and hacker culture (Morgan 2015) (Richardson 2017). Punk archaeology is proudly political and envisions a kind of archaeological inquiry that is more a participatory endeavour to be experienced/lived first-person and that also addresses the general public, rather than a theoretical/academic affair to be approached intellectually by experts. On this continuum, projects such as Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene or A Certain Kind of Freedom can be also thought of as ways to reclaim archaeology; that is, to strip it of its modernist underpinnings that suggest a class- (and gender-) specific worldview shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism (Hamilakis 2013, p195). More than simply suggesting this, punk archaeology indicates a way out of the conundrum of post-modernist archaeological re-framings: that is, how tame the unruly nature of the senses while unconditionally opening up archaeological scholarship to sensorial experiences of all sorts. Its proponents argue that punk archaeology can be an apparatus to this end.

See here for a detailed historical background

Some scholarship exists insofar as artistic practices vis-à-vis difficult history is concerned. For instance, Yalouri (Yalouri 2019) discusses visual engagements with the refugee issue in Greece, while MacDonald (MacDonald 2010) accounts for the ‘Fascination and Terror’ exhibition looking into the nazi history of the hosting city (Nuremberg), and Tali (2022) overviews theoretical and methodological frameworks concerning difficult pasts in and through arts with respect to political realities in Eastern Europe.

'Αφρικα'

The wider area surrounding northwestern Prespa, with its dense vegetation and rugged, limestone highlands, was generally referred to as ‘Άφρικα’ (Greek for Africa) by the fighters of the Democratic Army. This is where their General Headquarters were located and the seat of the Provisional Democratic Government (see Historical Background). Hence, ‘Αφρικα’ is part of the project’s title as a direct reference to both this particular location and the Greek Civil War.

Body, Humour

While political/historical affairs are an important locus around which the entire project revolves and from which it draws inspiration, there is much more to Αφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom. The body of the author is also central and of equal, if not of greater importance. All action and drama stem from there: it is the author is a literal presence that leads the walk, that ‘gets lost in the dark’, that seeks to unearth and evoke the violence that was once omnipresent. Such a tactic is, of course, inspired by performance archaeology and archaeology of the senses. Yet, a rather ‘punkish’ approach is followed here throughout, intensified by means of personal recollections (as outlined on the left); slapdash/ improvised performance (rather meaninglessly wandering through the vegetation for part of the walk); and last but not least, humour (it is with a humorous statement that the walk initiates). Overall, the body of the author as a performative element and as source of memory and strictly subjective sense-making is juxtaposed with the political/historical contexts at play.

It seems that an integrated study of the question of a more guerilla/punk-archaeological approach to difficult history is still lacking, however. 

The question of difficult heritage is well suited to punk-archaeological modes of inquiry. Arguably, in recent decades many museums and formal institutions have attempted bold movements away from convenient historical perspectives that typically affirm patriotic ideals and the legitimacy of sovereign states and instead demonstrated much greater appreciation for the complexities, competing motivations, and the potential for aggression and opposition inherent to human relationships (Simon 2011). Nevertheless, and despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the occasional proliferation of practices of remembrance related to violence, loss and death, there is an abundance of historical affairs in Greece that remain difficult heritage. The ongoing refugee crisis is certainly one such example, as are, e.g., the infamous Leros Asylum that caused an international scandal in the 1980s, the practice of decapitations and public exhibition of heads that was widespread throughout the 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries, and, of course, all sorts of affairs related to the Greek Civil War: deportation of children, controversial adoptions, war atrocities, mass graves, Napalm bombings, prison camps and exiles for political dissenters, the exoneration of Greek Axis collaborators and their important role in shaping national politics of the latter part of the 20th century, US’ State building, and more.

Άφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom is an attempt at a punk-archaeological approach to the difficult history of the Greek Civil War using a mixed method that combines several different performance tactics.

Key element 9 would (hopefully) be touched upon throughout the entire performance experience and via the overall sensation imparted on the audience following successful implementation.

Of course, as is very often the case, the performance that is eventually staged was expected to deviate from the draft plan above. As a rule of thumb, the author only finalizes peripatetic works of that kind on-location and immediately prior to their performance, as places are contingent and, much more often than not, appear to him different in significant and unpredictable ways at later times. Still, the above were the premises when the author visited the region again a few days prior to the public performance to work out the details. Some differences were immediately evident: there was no choir of birds that time of the year; a nearby restaurant broke the silence and the darkness up until around midnight; it was not logistically possible to install the hydrophone/loudspeaker rig. The Performance section bellow presents the finalized composition in more detail.

Composing

Following the author’s Scouting Expedition was a period of off-site research and creative work. The author studied historical accounts and scholarship about the area whilst seeking to understand which of the particular aspects of those that surfaced in the scouting expedition he wants to zero in on. Άφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom was largely shaped in this period. Drawing on his own first-person experience in the field and his particular way of making sense of difficult history, place, and memory, the author chose a few key elements and gradually structured a rough plan for a performance. These key elements are:

1. night / nightscapes of Prespa

2. the choir of birds in the Lesser Prespa Lake

3. the experience of walking the bridge between the land and Ay. Achillios island; the creaking sounds the bridge produces; the sense of danger

4. subaquatic sounds of the lakes

5. walking in the dark / getting lost in the dark

6. the sound of the frogs near the lake

7. the difficult heritage of the Civil War; violence

8. US intervention and State building

9. the question of freedom vis-à-vis politics, ideology, violence and own sense-making

The draft soundwalk shown in the author's sketchbook was composed around the above. There were, of course, many ambiguous and as-yet-undecided aspects for later in this draft, and the necessity for additional field research soon became evident. The draft nevertheless comprised a number of tactics for addressing all of the items enumerated above. Elements 1,2,3,5, and 6 were meant to be immediately listened to and/or experienced by an audience literally situated in the location. This already delineated a rough route to be walked and certain performance tactics (e.g. remaining silent, leading the audience to darker or more difficult to access areas, etc). Then, plans were made for a permanent hydrophone installation (with amplification and a loudspeaker) on the bridge so as to bring to the surface the subtle subaquatic soundscape, thus addressing element 4.

Element 7 pivots on how to unearth and give voice to the violence that once was ubiquitous in this area, the idea being to tackle this question both symbolically and phenomenologically; that is, introducing symbolic elements of drama (e.g. the military uniform worn by the author) as well as actually creating an intense experience that is reminiscent of war and the violence it conjures. To this end, the author prepared material to support several different options, sourcing a portable horn loudspeaker capable of very loud sounds and preparing several different versions of audio material to reproduce, as well as further experiments with flashing light sources.

As far as the question of US Intervention is concerned, the author soon discovered that under The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, the CIA partially disclosed internal reports and documents about the Greek Civil War and this particular region. Not only are these documents particularly enlightening regarding the US perspective and the international significance of these events, they also indicate that there still exist aspects that the US are not comfortable disclosing (large parts are still blacked out). How exactly to use this material was still unclear for the author at this stage.

Performance  

The route for the performance is shown in the map above. The performance largely reflects the draft plan discussed in the Composing section above. The performance proceeded as follows:

July 7, 2023; 1'00" AM

Welcome [~5']: Audience gathers on the side of the lake and near the bridge to the Ag. Achillios island; see point marked ‘x’ on the map above. The author welcomes the audience dressed in a military uniform.

Bridge [~10']: The author guides the audience on through the lake and on top of the bridge to reach the Ag. Achillios island.

Towards the Basilica [~5']: Once on the Ag. Achillios island the author leads the audience off the main route, thus leaving the few homes of the village behind, passing by the cemetery, and entering the nearby bush. The author leads the audience through the bush towards the ruins of the Basilica of St. Achillius (10th c. BCE); the only light is from the torch the author wears on his head.

Violence [15']: The author drifts around this area in a rather slapdash fashion while reproducing very loud synthetic noises, siren sounds, and piercing frequencies from a portable horn loudspeaker; at the very same time, he uses his head torch and a portable flashlight to produce red and white flashing lights. (These can be also seen and heard in this video )

Lost in the dark [5']: The author keeps moving around haphazardly, but this time in silence and quite often in darkness. He tends to favour difficult-to-reach spots and to hide himself in between the trees and in ditches; the audience is, accordingly, left rather disoriented and ‘lost’ in the darkness. This and the previous phase take place in the area within the yellow circle in the map above.

Return [~25'] The author eventually returns to the main path back to the village, turns on his head torch, and shows the way back while the audience gradually gathers behind him, finding its way once again.

Debriefing [~10'] When on the other side of the lake, the author shares copies of the declassified CIA documents regarding the Greek Civil War with his audience.

Several different individual tactics aid the staging of the above. The sheer phenomenology of actually being in this particular place at that particular time is one of the most important compositional aspects. The audience has an immediate experience of the scents of the lake, the bush, the reeds; they listen to the vocalizations of frogs and toads, various insects, and birds as well as to the creaking sounds of the bridge and the subtle waves of the lake; they feel the night breeze caress their skin and are gently (or more forcefully) pierced by the fauna and branches of trees; and they are bitten by mosquitoes. Then, there is the author’s outfit. It should be noted that the military uniform worn by the author is his own from when he did his military service (see Personal Recollections). It then affords two roles. First, it has a somewhat ‘sculptural’ or scenographic quality, as it is a material imbued with the memory of its past use. Secondly, and from the author’s point of view, it becomes a tool aiding him in personally connecting with the place and the difficult history it entails.

The ‘Violence’ phase above acts as an apparatus to dig out and unearth the memory of the place. The memory of the violence experienced not only by humans but also by the landscape itself – its animal, plant, and geophysical inhabitants. Loud noises, flashes of light in the dark, piercing frequencies, and sirens are all meant to induce a certain panic, danger, and alertness in the audience. The audience is then left in silence and darkness, disoriented and forced to find their own way through the bushes. The return is along the same route and the performance concludes with the audience spending time in a relatively illuminated place where they can decompress, survey the declassified CIA documents and discuss with one another.

See the complete collection of CIA records

The audience’s sensation should also be a very different one. Any element of ‘playfulness’ or ‘innocence’ (metaphorically) should have been eliminated and the experience is likely much less about the environmental sounds, the scents, or the subtle night breeze and overall being-in-the-field. Instead, the audience is much more likely to contemplate what has just happened; their witnessing the unearthing of some kind of violence intrinsic to this place, their more or less disoriented state and this experience of being left ‘unguided’ for a little bit in the dark and inhospitable bushes. Hopefully, the military outfit of the author should also acquire some new significance.

While elements of punk archaeology are already very evident in the method described here, a guerilla approach is gradually furthered as the author guides the audience deeper into the bush to eventually engage in full scale noise-making. The following 15' of loud, abstract, synthetic sounds and flashing lights accelerate the drama and, at the same time, create uneasiness and physical alertness – in a fashion very much inspired by sonic warfare tactics (Goodman 2012). The audience is left confused and disoriented while the author drifts among the bushes, sometimes in darkness and sometimes not. This is the equivalent of the ‘tactical’ silence moment in Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene: a strategically placed pause allowing hints of own meaning-making to surface. Here, too, these moments serve as both an immediate experiential condition as well as a gesture on behalf of the author. The aim is very different, however. Here, ‘getting lost in dark’ is meant as an articulation; it poses the question of (a certain kind of) freedom:

What does the CIA have to do with this place? Why are certain parts of the records blacked out? What could be possibly written there? Why was the US so involved in Greek affairs of the time? Is this still the case today?

The entire experience up to this point is orchestrated so as to, hopefully, conjure some related feeling. Not an immediate question about freedom, of course, but some ambiguous, subjective impression that is somehow reminiscent of such a question.

Seen through a morphological lens, the overall composition then has the form:

A → B → A' → C

A is the way towards and into a climax – a pandemonium of sound, light, and darkness. A' is the way back, but this time everything should be different. Metaphorical ‘innocence’ should be now lost: the audience is no longer ignorant but has a first-person experience of evocations of 'violence' related to this place. History should no longer be abstract but something somehow related to an intense phenomenological experience. Further context is given later on.

The decision to share the CIA documents was a difficult one. In reality, there can be no objective – not even pretentiously – history of the Greek Civil War. On one hand there is a plethora of written sources, including the official archives of the Greek National Army, the KKE’s (Greek Communist Party – see also Historical Background) historical records, numerous biographical and autobiographical accounts, works by Greek as well as foreign scholars, and more. Naturally, narration comes more often than not through ideological lenses and in ways that extend well beyond a simplistic left-wing/right-wing opposition; it also concerns leftist criticism of the KKE, KKE self-criticism (this actually led to the rupture of the Bucharest-based KKE leaders with the leaders of the illegal Greek fraction in the 1960s, so that for several of the following decades there were two KKEs: the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ one), (non-)royalist right-wing lenses, pro/anti-American lenses, foreign colonial and post-colonial readings, and more. It should be noted that several records about the Greek Civil War (in the UK, the US, Greece, and Russia) are still classified and will not be disclosed any time soon.

Sharing the CIA records with the audience is an apparatus that serves several compositional purposes at once. On a poetical level, it operates as a decompression buffer zone: the performance fades out into an informal ending but the audience is still pretty much engaged with the key aspects of the work. Beside the reeds at the side of the lake and against the sounds of the frogs in the background, the audience is still given pieces of information about the history of the place and enjoys an opportunity to talk with one another or with the author about the experience they have just lived. Then, the CIA records immediately delineate political controversies and historical bewilderedness.

How free is someone left alone confused, disoriented, and delirious in the dark inhospitable bushes? What comes next?

Discussion

Άφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom concerns the staging of an experiential art/archaeology theatre that pivots on two loci. On one hand, it centres on the body of the performer: leading the way, providing a symbolic centre of focus, performing dramatic gestures, emanating sound and light, staying silent, getting lost in the dark. On the other, it revolves around the landscape itself, which oscillates between being quiet, subtle, idyllic and picturesque and being dangerous, delirious, and inhospitable. The dark bushes, the loud noises, the flashing red lights, the sirens evoke a difficult past and memories of war and violence. As accounted for in this exposition, several distinct tactics are at play, and some common ground with the case of Tactics Against Antiquity: The Contemporary Ancient Messene is more than evident. Yet there are also important differences. Much like that case, the firm and inescapable sensation of being-in-the-place provides a very concrete background against which a sensorial theatre can be staged while it also becomes an essential part of the latter in a rather reciprocal manner. Then, ‘tactical’ silences, politicized narratives, an overall punk-archaeological attitude, and a dedicated outfit are also important elements in both projects.

Here, however, there is an explicit articulation of drama. The way back is not the same as the way in. The return is along the exact same route and the author is equally silent as when heading towards Ag. Achillios.

The above questions should resonate when surveying the CIA records and link back to affairs of freedom as outlined above.

At the same time, a wealth of historical information is revealed in a language that, whilst ideological, is generally not pompous, and that abstains from exaggerations and attempts to galvanize. Last but not least, members of the audience are given something to take with them so that the memory of the overall experience is sustained over time.

All in all, a certain compositional trajectory is achieved by means of different tactical apparatuses. One guides the audience from the current reality of the landscape to evocations of a violent past, and back to a contemporary reality that is no longer the same. Being much more aware of the significance of the past in this part of the world (in both symbolic/metaphorical, dramatic, and concretely intellectual ways), audiences are now left to make their own sense of difficult history, past and present-day politics and the ramifications thereof, and, eventually, to contemplate questions of freedom and emancipation.