Heortotopias: Festive geographies of embodied resistance

Abstract

This article introduces heortotopia as a contemporary form of spatial otherness: an ephemeral, embodied and conflictual spatiality produced through festive collective practices mobilized in protest and political struggle. It asks how other spaces might be understood as practices of collective becoming. The concept is developed through a critical engagement with Foucault’s heterotopia, reworked through the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari and Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. While heterotopology has been influential in mapping spatial difference, its emphasis on regulation limits its capacity to account for chaotic, creative, and generative forms of spatial production. Drawing on Bakhtin, the article reconceptualizes other spaces as spaces of becoming, produced through embodied excess, wild joy, methexis and creative rage. Heortotopias are theorized as procedural spatialities that temporarily territorialize alternative worlds-in-progress and reconfigure political actions through festive disruption. Empirically, the article draws on qualitative research with grassroots collectives in five Greek regions. The findings demonstrate how grassroots collectives mobilize festivity as an embodied and dialogical practice of becoming, producing temporary spatial formations through which alternative forms of coexistence, care and collective existence are enacted in the present.