Eleni Vrettakou
Artist in Residence
Based in: Greece
Participated in: Evia Local Urban Lab
Eleni Vrettakou is an artist, designer, and researcher based between Greece and the Netherlands. Her practice is rooted in interdisciplinary research, with ecology as a central framework. She investigates the intricate relationships between nature and culture, industry, domestication, and climate-driven migration. Through multimedia works, designed objects, and filmmaking, she navigates unfolding histories and envisions alternative ways of seeing, being, and acting.
With a background in Geo-Design, her work critically examines design’s material impact and its role within ecological, infrastructural, and social systems. Her work engages with systemic complexities while seeking to bridge planetary concerns with intimate, localised responses. By integrating research with tactile and poetic expressions, she highlights the interconnectedness of human and non-human environments.
Un/Making Ground, (2025)
“Un/making ground” gathers what remains of Evia’s recent floods and wildfires, charred pine trees whose root systems once stabilised rivers; silted mud accumulating inside vacant buildings, long after the water has receded. These materials are not neutral. They carry the imprint of climate precarity and inadequate climate response infrastructures. The project examines erosion as both a physical process and a methodology, reflecting on how environmental trauma, human intervention, and material memory intersect.
Burnt surfaces are slowly sanded away, re-written by time, care, and contact, their dust archived. Clay sediments are reshaped into objects that recall architectural fragments: thresholds, sills, remnants of disrupted domesticity. Decay is not resisted but embraced, the sculptures remain unfinished, exposed to touch, time, and weather.
Rather than portraying destruction, the project reflects on the temporalities of degradation and repair. Erosion, too often seen as loss, is also a mode of transformation. What does it mean to work with unstable matter, to make with care when permanence can no longer be assumed?
