For the fourth and final round of the Evoia Local Urban Lab, Artit brought together two artists whose work could hardly look more different on the surface, and yet kept circling back to the same question: how does a place hold onto what’s happened to it? Over a three-month digital residency from October to December 2025, photographer Thodoris Nikolaou and designer-researcher Yannis Mantzaris worked side by side, each carrying their own long relationship with Evoia. Theodore grew up in Chalkis with the north of the island close to home; Yannis arrived through his research into how environmental and political systems quietly shape the spaces we live in. They worked apart, but never far from each other’s thinking, and what they came back with sits beautifully together: one artist crouched close to a single family’s daily life, the other standing back to take in an entire, contested sea.
Getting Grounded Together
The residency began on 3 November with both artists, curator Valia Almpani, and project manager Eva Ploumistou sitting down to talk through where each project might go. Theodore was already thinking in terms of Ancestors, a photographic exploration of how the communities of Northern Evoia have carried the weight of the 2021 wildfires and floods, with photovoice work alongside local residents at its centre. Yannis, meanwhile, was just starting to pull at a different thread: the overlapping, often quietly competing claims on the Evoikos Gulf, from protected posidonia meadows to fish farm licences and a shelved plan for floating solar panels.
As the months went on, Theodore brought in an unexpected but invaluable collaborator: Zisoula Ntasiou, Fire Colonel and Forester Engineer, Chief of the Attica Regional Coordination Centre of the Hellenic Fire Service, and Vice President of CTIF. Talking through the conditions that led to the 2021 fires, and how the land has been recovering since, Ntasiou gave his photographic instincts something firmer to stand on. By the time the artists reconvened for a mid-residency check-in on 20 November, both projects had visibly grown teeth, and the conversation turned to the small, practical decisions that would carry each piece to completion.
Thodoris Nikolaou – Ancestors
Theodore has spent his career photographing people at the edges of crisis, mental health, and social vulnerability, work that’s taken him through a Master’s in Photography and Visual Language and into a research post at the University of Western Attica’s Centre for Research on Social and Humanitarian Crises. Ancestors draws on all of that, unfolding across four chapters. The first two, “Fire-Flood” and “Aftermath,” pull from his own archive to show the disaster as it happened and the scarred landscape it left behind. “The Cycle of Trauma” slows things down into Polaroid diptychs, sitting with the strange, damaged intimacy between people and the land they’ve hurt and been hurt by in turn.
But it’s the final chapter, “Twins,” that really anchors the residency. Theodore found his way to Kastri, a remote village in Northern Evoia, and to twin siblings Marianiki and Christos Kouvelis. Rather than photographing them, he handed them the camera, or really, their own phones, and let them document their world on their own terms through photovoice. He stayed close throughout, mentoring over social media when he couldn’t be there in person and returning for visits to help shape the work further, but the images themselves belong to the twins. What comes through is less a story about Kastri than a story told from inside it.
Yannis Mantzaris – Scarring Boundaries: Renegotiating the Surface
Yannis brings an unusually wide-angled background to his work, with degrees in physics and product design and an MA in Geo-design from the Design Academy Eindhoven, all of it pointed at one recurring question: how do climate, politics, and infrastructure quietly carve up the spaces we share? In Evoia, that question led him out onto the water itself. He spent his residency talking to scientists, fishermen, activists, and cultural workers, gradually mapping a sea that turns out to be far more divided than it looks: protected meadows, licensed and unlicensed fish farms, a rejected proposal for floating solar installations, and the slower, less visible damage of eutrophication and abandoned “phantom” nets.
What he built from all of this is Scarring Boundaries: Renegotiating the Surface, an installation of mirrors, steel, salt, and hidden lighting. The mirrors sit at human height, in different sizes, each one holding a fragment of the maps and testimonies he gathered along the way. There’s something deliberately unsettled about them: the metal frames feel close and communal, the way coastal life often does, but they also close things off, the way a sea gets divided once everyone starts claiming a piece of it. Standing in front of the work, the gulf stops feeling like a fixed place on a map and starts feeling like something alive and argued over, reshaped by whoever happens to be using it.
Íchni II: Six Artists, One Room
Both pieces had their first public outing as part of Íchni II, a group show curated by Valia Almpani at Artit’s space in Piraeus opening May 2026. It turned into something bigger than just a closing event for Round IV. For the first time, all six artists who’ve passed through the Evia Local Urban Lab over its three cycles, Theodore Nikolaou and Yannis Mantzaris alongside Christina Maridaki, Giorgos Gerontides, Angela Liosi, and Maria Gouveli, were in the same room together. Years of separate residencies suddenly sat side by side, and the choice of Piraeus, a city that’s always defined itself by its relationship to the sea, gave the whole show an extra charge, carrying Evoia’s story somewhere it could meet new audiences entirely.
Looking Ahead
Earlier rounds of the lab found their way into the fires and floods through sculpture, mapping, and film. This round goes both closer in and further out at the same time, from a child’s photograph taken on an ordinary afternoon in Kastri to the tangled governance of an entire gulf. The Evia Local Urban Lab closes here, but the portrait doesn’t feel finished so much as handed over to everyone in Evoia still living the next page of it.
Don’t forget to explore Thodoris’s and Yannis’s work in more detail!
