What happens when artists, researchers, and communities come together in a landscape shaped by fire and flood? From May 14–16, 2025, ARTIT had the honour of hosting the Íchni International Lab in Chalcis, Evoia, as part of the wider Turning the Tide initiative, co-funded by Creative Europe. This three-day gathering brought together cultural organisations, artists, academics, and local voices from across Sweden, Austria, Poland, Greece, Scotland, and the Netherlands to explore one urgent question: How can culture help us process, heal, and adapt in the face of overlapping environmental crises?
In the month leading up to the final event, a group of international and local artists took part in a residency across Evoia, living in the region, engaging directly with communities, and listening to their experiences. Through conversations, site visits, and shared time, they encountered firsthand the trauma and resilience that have shaped the land since the devastating wildfires of 2021 and the floods that followed. These exchanges became the foundation for the artworks and ideas presented during the public programme. Through public talks, partner presentations, roundtable discussions, a site visit to post-crisis villages in Northern Evoia, and an exhibition of works created during the residency, we explored how creative practice and collective knowledge can begin to restore broken relationships, with land, with memory, and with each other. This wasn’t a conference. It was a living lab, a space to test, to listen, to challenge, and to care.
Day 1: European Perspectives on Art, Crisis, and Care
The first day brought partners from across Europe to share how their organisations are leveraging art, education, storytelling, and public engagement to address climate change in vulnerable regions. Opened by Danai Papadimitriou and moderated by Anaïs Roussou, presentations included educational strategies for youth (Wiener Bildungsakademie), intercultural community practices (Intercult), artistic placemaking (Instytut Kultury Miejskiej), environmental storytelling (Fablevision), and cartopological research (Dear Hunter).
Guest speakers expanded the conversation further: Christina Leigh Geros from the Royal College of Art explored “knowledge infrastructures” and ethical climate communication; Paris Papagrigoriou from Caritas Hellas shared community-based post-crisis recovery strategies; and photographer Thodoris Nikolaou reminded us that behind every environmental disaster are human stories that deserve witnessing and care. The day surfaced key questions that would echo throughout the lab: How do we avoid extractive cultural practices? What does long-term accountability look like? And how can we build transnational solidarity through art?
Day 2: Listening to the Landscape
The second day was dedicated to direct engagement with Northern Evia, where the aftermath of wildfires and floods remains deeply felt. The group visited Agia Anna, warmly welcomed by Caritas Hellas, walking through the village and learning about the challenges of rebuilding not just infrastructure, but trust and community life. In Limni, artist Angela Liosi shared a site-specific presentation exploring the town’s emotional landscape through movement, sound, and memory. The visit concluded at the Forest Museum of Prokopi, run by local volunteer firefighters, offering an ecological context to the region’s vulnerability and the relationship between deforestation, water flow, and disaster. What made the day unforgettable, however, wasn’t part of the official agenda. As the group walked through a village, a local woman, Ms. Sofia, approached unprompted and shared her story, the fear as fires approached, the flood damage to her home, and her family’s ongoing recovery. Her words, spoken quietly and from the heart, reminded everyone that collective trauma lives in people, not just policies, and that healing begins with being heard.
Day 3: Íchni: Memories of the Future
The exhibition Íchni: Memories of the Future, curated by Valia Almpani, featured seven artists who responded to Evia’s lived and ecological realities through site-responsive works. Zoe Franzén Lakides presented Crumbles & Ash (2025), a sound-based performance exploring displacement and belonging through the metaphor of a transplanted tree. Jo Hodges & Robbie Coleman offered Six Bowls: Ecologies of Resistance (2025), a participatory installation using elemental materials to propose new ways of thinking about extractivism and repair, alongside Campfire Tales (2025), bundles of scorched firewood reclaiming fire as connection rather than destruction. Johanna Tinzl’s On Agreeing (2025) used burnt wood and metal to stage a dialogue between OXI (NO) and NAI (YES), exploring how societies co-create justice in climate emergencies.
Photo Credits: ©WBA Herger/Seidl
Eleni Vrettakou’s Un/making Ground (2025) gathered materials left by floods and fires, charred trees, silt, and sediment, creating sculptural forms reminiscent of domestic ruins, left unfinished and exposed to time and weather. Froso Papadimitriou presented The Golden Pine Cone (2025), watercolours and digital prototypes exploring how neglect turns environmental risk into catastrophe, and Co-existence (2025), created with children from local villages, using white threads on canvas as metaphors for forgotten relationships with nature, brought back to visibility through the children’s colouring. Omeeros presented Asymmetrical Care (2025), an installation using soil, plants, and a dehumidifier to draw parallels between emotional and literal flooding, questioning how nurturing forces can become overwhelming if unbalanced. Giannis Koulouridis showed oil paintings capturing the psychological aftermath of disasters, transforming abstract landscapes into visual metaphors of loss and adaptation. Dear Hunter (Marlies Vermeulen and Remy Kroese) contributed Káto Kósmos & Áno Kósmos on Evia (2025), a cartopological map layering personal observation and local storytelling to reveal the disconnect between lived experience and formal planning offering an alternative geography of Evia built on presence and narrative depth.
This large, detailed map captures the layered realities of Evia. All Turning the Tide maps will be published in an Atlas by Dear Hunter in 2026. Copyrights: Dear Hunter.
From Evia, Onward
Over three days, the Íchni International Lab brought together artists, researchers, communities, and organisations from across Europe to exchange ideas, share methods, and present work shaped by lived experience in Evia. We extend our warmest thanks to every artist, speaker, partner, community member, and collaborator who contributed time, care, and imagination to this process, especially the residents of Evia, who opened their homes, memories, and landscapes to us. Íchni is not a one-off event. It is a methodology. A mindset. At ARTIT, we believe that arts and culture have a critical role to play in times of crisis. That’s why we’re already planning to continue Íchni in other affected regions of Greece, with new residencies, new labs, and new communities. This is just the beginning. Let’s keep tracing what matters.
To dive deeper into the artistic journeys and creative insights behind these works, be sure to explore Zoe’s, Robbie’s and Jo’s, as well as Johanna’s projects in full. The story continues; stay connected for what’s next!
This initiative is part of Turning the Tide, a pan-European project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Through residencies, labs, and cultural actions in coastal and climate-affected regions across Europe, the project brings together artists, communities, and institutions to co-create responses to environmental challenges.
