About Me
Welcome, and thank-you for visiting.
I’m Christos Galanis. Here are some details about myself, my background and experience, and my intentions around my work.
In terms of ‘official’ titles and educational training I’ve earned over the years, I completed a BFA in Integrated Music Studies (with distinction) from Concordia University (Montreal) where I also volunteered as a music therapist with adults with developmental disabilities. I then went on to complete an MFA (with distinction) in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico (UNM). While at UNM, I spent a field-semester in the Land Arts of the American West program, travelling throughout the South-West US and Mexico and living on the land while responding artistically and ritually to diverse sites and histories. Over the course of that MFA program I was the instructor of record for seven semesters of various undergraduate courses in the studio art department, with my own work focusing especially on performance and site-specific memorials.
In 2014 I was awarded a full scholarship from the University of Edinburgh to undertake a PhD in the Cultural Geography department. My thesis was concerned with critically exploring the practice of summiting and ‘collecting’ mountain peaks in the previously ethnically cleansed Highlands of Scotland, while simultaneously interviewing Canadians of Scottish descent who were traveling to the same Highland landscape in order to re-connect with their Scottish ancestors and ancestral lands. In 2019 a severe case of Lyme disease caused me to interrupt my thesis writing, and Covid-19 in 2020 has likewise upended everything - so thesis submission and defence remains on hold at about 80% complete. Parallel to my PhD studies I participated in and completed Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Much of my approach current approach has been deeply informed by this twin process of both a rigorous and critical PhD program from one of the world’s top 20-ranked Universities and - in some ways - an even more demanding and grief-soaked program of study under the mentorship of Stephen Jenkinson at Orphan Wisdom. I have come to say that my years of living in the UK and studying internal British colonial history helped me considerably in my capacity for better understanding the modern world and what it is that took root among the wake of millions of displaced colonial European settlers.
My Greek/Macedonian ancestors on my Mother’s side
Over the past year, through a dark night of the soul, what finally emerged within me was a longing to turn away from the academically-ingrained habit of critical thinking and focusing on what’s broken. Instead, I have committed to re-focusing my skills and capacities towards conjuring more beauty and a deeper sense of meaning in the world through the work of Kairos and other projects in the pipeline.
In terms of my own personal and familial context, displacement and homelessness runs deep in my bones. I am the fourth generation of men in my family (that I know of) who has left their country of birth and immigrated abroad. My Great-Grandfather Vasili left Greece in the 1920s to immigrate to the U.S. and work on the railroad in Michigan and Illinois. My Grandfather was a political refugee who left Greece and fled to Toronto, Canada in the late 1950s. My father fled Greece by way of Toronto as well in the late 1960s in order to escape the military dictatorship that had overthrown the Greek government in a western-backed coup. And I myself left my home country of Canada and became a Greek citizen and moved to Europe in 2014, and then immigrated to the U.S. in 2020 after marrying my U.S. partner.
Much of my life has been spent contemplating this question of displacement, belonging, and ancestry - and how to develop technologies to re-orient us to place, community, and purpose. It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered that between 1815 and 1932, over 60 million Europeans emigrated abroad — the largest migration of humans *ever* in human history to date. Entire villages boarded steam-ships together and never looked back, often leaving nobody behind to tend to the graves and ancestral relationships, and often leaving traditions and place-based rituals behind. And with those displacements also came the full or partial severing of relationships with place and the beings that inhabited them. And yet, there is virtually no awareness in the public sphere about what the consequences of this great migration were (for both European and Non-European ancestored peoples), what caused it, and how folks coped with and survived such a deep uprooting - both those who fled, and those living and dead who were left behind.
To be clear - I’m not a therapist. I’m not going to diagnose you, nor tell you what’s ‘wrong’ with you, nor set out to fix or heal you as if you’re a problem that needs to be analysed and solved. The scope of my work, and its paradigm, is that I will invite you to consider and practice ways through which to increase the amount, the quality, and the diversity of mutually life-nourishing relationships throughout your life. I’m also not setting out a program for us of trying to heal or fix ‘our' culture. Culture is a living, complex organism which is ‘cultivated' every moment of every day - or not - by our words and thoughts , our practices and rituals, and our actions in relation with others. We’re all affecting its unfolding as much by trying to escape it as fix it, meaning that we can’t get outside of it nor transcend it. We’re in for the ride, regardless of how we feel about it.
Whether we move to a remote Tibetan village, or start a "new" colony on Mars, we bring ourselves and our culture with us. So rather, I lay the option before you for cultivating regenerative cultures, one relationship at a time - one ceremony or ritual at a time - and trusting that the impacts of those thriving new networks of connections will go out and work upon the world and the culture and unfold in ways we could never predict - in ways more profound and weird and original than anything we could have imagined on our own.