In this episode of InsurgenSeas, we sit down with Daniel Powers, Lizzie Malcolm, and Stefanos Levidis to explore how the sea is being remapped from below.

Our conversation moves through the Flotilla Tracker as a tool of maritime activism: who builds and uses it, who it serves, and how it circulates within networks of solidarity. We trace the origins and ambitions of Forensic Architecture, unpacking its methods and political commitments to evidentiary practice against state violence. Together, we reflect on the power of mapping to make movements at sea visible, while questioning how visibility itself is shaped by the state’s surveillance gaze and migrant “mobility tracking.”

Turning to the tragic Pylos shipwreck, Stefanos shares insights into documentation efforts and the challenges of contesting state narratives and legal obfuscation surrounding responsibility for mass death at sea. The discussion broadens to “mapping from below”, who these counter-mapping practices serve, who their allies are, and how they reconfigure the terrain of struggle across maritime borders.

Finally, we pause to reflect critically on mapping as an aesthetic practice: does it risk beautifying suffering and movement, or can it hold space for political urgency without flattening lived realities?

A conversation at once academic and human, this episode invites us to rethink the sea as a contested archive where evidence flow alongside currents of control.

Link of episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIprW8-d10U

Notes:

In this episode, Kostas Fourikos, a filmmaker and activist, speaks to us aboard the Greek ship of the Sumud Flotilla, sailing south of Crete on its way to Gaza.

His life’s work moves between cinema, cultural organizing, and political struggle and on this ship, all of these threads meet.

We discuss the flotilla as a refusal of siege, borders, occupation, and genocide. From a country whose government conforms with the global order of domination and war, even when its people have showed histories of solidarity, Kostas reflects on what it means to resist within and against these structures.