What Happened During Evoia’s Local Urban Labs, Organised by Artit

Some places carry their wounds in plain sight. Evoia, Greece's second-largest island, is one of them. Wildfires have torn through more than 15% of its land in recent years, and brutal storms and floods have followed close behind, leaving communities, landscapes and infrastructure shaken. It's precisely this fragile, resilient place that Artit chose as the beating heart of Turning the Tide's Local Urban Labs for Greece, a four-round journey that paired artists with local communities to see what art could do with grief, memory and survival.

Here's the story of how it all unfolded.

Round I: Where the Story Began

It started in 2024, with two artists stepping into Evoia for the first time. Giorgos Gerontides, a Thessaloniki-based artist known for public art rooted in social issues, spent time in North Evoia making Vulnerable Nets, a documentary that turned the camera on the grassroots groups quietly holding the region together, permaculture cooperatives, volunteer firefighters, forest conservation collectives, and community organisers who'd stepped up when the fires hit hardest.

Meanwhile, in the hot springs town of Edipsos, Athens-based artist Christina Maridaki spent eleven immersive days with a very different kind of resilience. Her project Feminsularity followed the women of Edipsos as they gathered at the thermal springs, tracing how identity, healing and community take shape around shared water. A documentary and a zine came out of it, weaving in mythology, eco-feminist thinking, and the everyday rituals of women finding strength together.

Before any of this, the whole thing had begun with a digital workshop led by design researcher Dr Spyros Bofylatos, and a meeting with the Mayor of Istiaia-Edipsos, who offered his own perspective on the island's long road to recovery. By August, the artists came together for a closing roundtable to reflect on what they'd made and what it had cost them, emotionally, to make it.

Round II: Grief, Maps, and the Things We Forget to Mourn

The second round, later in 2024, welcomed Angela Liosi and Maria Gouveli, and pushed the project somewhere even more tender: the floods, and everything, and everyone, they took.

Angela's sculptural installation Water Walk is built around a devastating truth: that after disasters, the animals lost rarely make it into the story. Her ark-like structure, an amphibious creature stitched together from multiple species, refuses the usual line that "at least no human life was lost." It sits in Mela's building in Limni until 2027, a lasting memorial to the lives too easily written off as collateral.

Maria's Nexus Project took a completely different form: a sprawling, rhizomatic map of the Lelantine Plain, an area with its own long history of flooding and renewal. Rather than borders and straight lines, her map follows rivers, conversations and memory, blending research and eco-feminist theory into something that keeps growing the longer you look at it.

Round III: When Local Meets International

By mid-2025, Artit tried something new: blending the Local Urban Lab with the International Lab, so that artists who knew Evoia intimately could work alongside those seeing it for the first time. The focus sharpened on the 2021 wildfires and floods in Northern Evoia, and how political negligence and administrative failure had turned a natural disaster into something far worse.

Artists visited the villages hit hardest, including the exact spot where the 2021 fires began, and sat through educational sessions with atmospheric physicist Marilena Gidarakou to ground their work in the science behind the climate events reshaping the region.

It all came together in Íchni: Memories of the Future, a three-day public exhibition at Tetartokyklion, overlooking the Euripus Strait, a spot famous for its strange tidal reversals, which became a fitting metaphor for a show about instability and change. Froso Papadimitriou presented two works: The Golden Pine Cone, a fairy tale built from testimonies gathered in the villages of Kourkouloi, Kexries and Skepasti, and Co-existence, made with local children using thread on canvas, inspired by the myth of the three fates.

Alongside her, Eleni Vrettakou showed Un/Making Ground, a multimedia piece built from charred pine roots and flood-silted clay, sitting with erosion as both a physical process and a way of thinking about memory and care.

Round IV: Closing the Circle

The fourth and final round unfolded quietly, over a three-month digital residency from October to December 2025, pairing photographer Thodoris Nikolaou with designer-researcher Yannis Mantzaris. Curator Valia Almpani and project manager Eva Ploumistou guided the process from the start, as the two artists worked in parallel but often crossed paths in conversation.

Thodoris's Ancestors unfolds across four chapters, moving from archival images of the fires and floods into intimate Polaroid diptychs, before landing on its most striking chapter, Twins. In the village of Kastri, he handed his camera, really, their own phones, to twin siblings Marianiki and Christos Kouvelis, letting them document their world on their own terms through photovoice, with Thodoris mentoring from a distance.

Yannis, meanwhile, turned his attention to the sea itself. Scarring Boundaries: Renegotiating the Surface is an installation of mirrors, steel, salt and hidden lighting, built from conversations with fishermen, scientists and activists about the quiet, competing claims on the Evoikos Gulf, protected seagrass meadows, fish farms, a shelved floating solar project, and the slow damage of abandoned "phantom" nets.

Both pieces debuted at Íchni II, a group exhibition at Artit's space in Piraeus in May 2026, which brought together, for the first time, all eight artists who had passed through Evoia's Local Urban Lab: Thodoris, Yannis, Christina, Giorgos, Angela, Maria, Froso and Eleni, along with the two international artists, Eva and Jenny, standing in one room with years of separate residencies suddenly side by side.

A Story That Isn't Really Finished

Across four rounds, the Evoia Local Urban Lab moved from documentaries to sculptures, from maps to mirrors, from a child's snapshot of an ordinary afternoon to the tangled politics of an entire gulf. What ties it all together isn't a single medium or message, but a shared instinct: that art can hold onto what a place has been through without flattening it into a headline. The lab may have closed, but as its own closing note put it, the portrait doesn't feel finished so much as handed over, to Evoia, and to everyone still living its next chapter.