Yannis Mantzaris

Artist in Residence

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Based in: Greece

Yannis Mantzaris is a designer, artist, and researcher based in Athens, Greece. His interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of art, design, critical theory, and cultural analysis, exploring how climate, politics, and material infrastructures shape contemporary life. Through installations, moving image, objects, and participatory encounters, Mantzaris investigates the visible and invisible systems that mediate collective experience from urban environments and economies to ecological and migratory flows. His work unfolds as both critical and poetic practice, revealing the frictions, contradictions, and negotiations that define the everyday. Engaging scales that range from the local to the planetary, Mantzaris constructs speculative frameworks that invite reflection and imagination. For him, design functions as both a mode of inquiry and a tool for envisioning alternative futures spaces where narrative, politics, and collective agency converge. He studied physics, product design and holds MA Geo-design from DAE.

Scarring Boundaries: Renegotiating the Surface, 2026

The installation consists of mirrors, steel, salt, and concealed lighting. The materials and construction techniques are foregrounded, shaping the spatial and perceptual conditions of the work as an integrated system. The metallic frames establish a perimeter that invites the viewer to enter, evoking both the sense of community characteristic of local societies around the Argosaronikos Gulf and the condition of isolation and enclosure often experienced at the individual level when confronting the traces of boundaries conceived ,divided or shaped through human interests and claims.

The research underpinning the work focused on the delineation of boundaries through maps and testimonies: the limits of posidonia meadows, existing fish farms, those under permit and proposed for future licensing, as well as rejected proposals for floating photovoltaic installations. These overlapping territorial claims intersect with phenomena such as eutrophication and the presence of “phantom nets,” alongside the shifting conditions of species, livelihoods, and practices that are continuously negotiated through both environmental processes and digital permitting platforms.

At the same time, the project is informed by a broader reading of the sea’s surface as a contested spatial regime, an interface where lived, shared experience is transformed into a stratified field of economic investment and political tension. Drawing on encounters with scientists, cultural practitioners, activists, and local residents, the sea emerges not as a bounded object but as a relational environment shaped by movement, use, and inhabitation. Within this framework, Marine Spatial Planning policies, emerging zoning frameworks, and proposed floating photovoltaic infrastructures in the Evoikos Gulf reveal collective anxieties and speculative futures, where governance systems, technological imaginaries, and embodied experiences converge and sometimes conflict.

Mirrors, positioned at human height and in varying scales, hold fragmented reflections of maps, narratives, and concerns gathered throughout the research. The resulting environment weaves together material experience and collective imagination, inviting the viewer into a dynamic process of perception, negotiation, and critical reflection on the layered spatial and political entanglements of the sea’s surface.