From Sea to Sky: Island Poetics, Figurative and Literal Islandness – Analyzing literary, artistic, and metaphorical interpretations of islands and archipelagos

This panel explores islands as both material and imaginative spaces, bringing together poetic, philosophical, and cultural perspectives to examine how islandness operates across literal and figurative dimensions. Through the lens of archipelagic thinking, the presentations consider how islands function not only as geographic entities but also as forms of connection, loss, and reimagining. By approaching poetry as an archipelagic form, the panel highlights how poetic language can reveal hidden relations, reawaken sensory experience, and reconnect human expression to ecological and nonhuman worlds. At the same time, reflections on the submerged island of Ada Kaleh trace how disappearance and displacement give rise to enduring emotional geographies, where memory, nostalgia, and identity persist even in the absence of the physical landscape. Together, these perspectives illuminate how islandness moves between the literal and the figurative, inviting us to rethink place, belonging, and ecological connection across environments and imaginations.