Entanglements: a week in the caves, palaces and mountains of central Crete

On Sunday 18 October the first EASE Artist Venturing Lab opens in Zaros, a village on the southern slopes of Psiloritis, the highest mountain on Crete. For six days, a diverse group of researchers will work side by side at sites where climate, water and human history have been tangled together for thousands of years. The lab is centred around the idea of Entanglements as a starting point: how things are inevitably and inextricably connected.

The week starts underground in a live climate-monitoring site, where data loggers record conditions in the cave and collectors catch the water dripping from its ceiling. Those drips build the stalagmites that scientists read layer by layer, like tree rings, to reconstruct past climate. The group spends the whole day at the cave with the science team, learning what the instruments record and how a column of stone becomes evidence. Outside the entrance, the first session of assemblage mapping begins: a shared way of drawing out the people, places, tools and ideas that make up what we know.

A short drive south brings the lab to Phaistos, one of the great Minoan palaces, and to Gortyn, where the oldest surviving law code in Europe is carved into stone. Around Phaistos, current research is tracing a buried Bronze Age lake and the dams and channels the Minoans built to manage water. Walking the sites, the group explores the landscape together and asks how something as fluid as water can be shown, mapped or made visible.

The next day the lab unfolds in and around Ideon Cave, at almost 1,500 metres altiude, which Greek myth links to the infancy of Zeus and where offerings were left from the Neolithic to Roman times. A walk across the high plateau below passes geological basins, old trackways and a stone angel sculpture, before reaching Zominthos, a Minoan mountain palace at 1,200 metres on the same ancient route. Surrounded by myth, ritual and geology, the artists present their own work to the group for the first time.

Back near Zaros, Lake Votomos keeps a record of sediment at its edge and is one of the team's active monitoring sites. Standing at the water, scientists and artists trace connections from the Minoan period through Roman and Byzantine times. A fast-paced sprint workshop then pulls the threads of the week together, and the group shares its emerging maps and creative directions, with a second round of artist presentations.

The last day brings the five sites together into one constellation. Through a final round of assemblage mapping and a group reflection, the lab asks how this tangle of evidence, myth, water and stone can be shared with people who were not there, and what artists, scientists and entrepreneurs might make of it together.

Follow the lab here and on Instagram as it happens. The second lab, Materiality, begins a week later in the potters' village of Margarites.