Three Days in Chalcis, Evoia: When Turning the Tide met in Evoia

Some conversations can't happen in a conference hall. In mid-May 2025, Artit opened its doors in Chalcis, Evoia for exactly that kind of conversation, three days that brought cultural organisations, artists, researchers and everyday residents from Sweden, Austria, Poland, Greece, Scotland and the Netherlands into the same rooms, streets and living rooms of Evoia. The International Lab, was part of Turning the Tide, and it set out to answer something far harder than any panel discussion usually manages: what can culture actually do when a place has been burned, flooded, and left to recover largely on its own?

The public days were only the surface. In the weeks before, a mixed group of international and local artists had already moved into the region, staying with the questions rather than rushing to answer them, sitting with residents, walking the scarred hillsides, and letting what they heard shape what they would eventually make.

Day One: Borrowed Lessons from Across Europe

The lab opened with partners comparing notes on how their own organisations use culture to face down climate crisis. Wiener Bildungsakademie spoke to educational work with young people, Intercult brought its experience in cross-cultural community building, Instytut Kultury Miejskiej discussed art rooted in place, Fablevision shared how storytelling can carry environmental messages further than data ever could, and Dear Hunter introduced their unusual practice of mapping, part cartography, part collective memory.

Outside voices sharpened the discussion further. A researcher from the Royal College of Art raised uncomfortable questions about who gets to tell climate stories and who is left out of them. A Caritas Hellas representative spoke from the ground, about what recovery actually looks like once the news cameras leave. And photographer Thodoris Nikolaou offered a quieter reminder: that every statistic about a disaster is really a stand-in for someone's Tuesday afternoon, someone's home, someone's fear. By the end of the day, the room had circled back again and again to the same uneasy questions, about extraction disguised as engagement, about who stays accountable once a project ends, and about whether solidarity across borders is even possible without first sitting still and listening.

Day Two: The Island Speaks for Itself

The second day left the conference room behind entirely. The group travelled north to Agia Anna, where Caritas Hellas welcomed them into a village still working through what it means to rebuild, not just walls and roofs, but trust between neighbours and a sense of normal life. In Limni, artist Angela Liosi guided a site-specific presentation that traced the town's emotional terrain through movement and sound rather than explanation. The day closed at Prokopi's Forest Museum, staffed by the very volunteer firefighters who'd fought the 2021 blazes, where the group learned how deforestation, water flow and fire risk are all tangled together in ways policy documents rarely capture.

But the moment that stayed with everyone wasn't on the itinerary at all. Walking through one of the villages, the group was approached by a local woman, Ms. Sofia, who simply began to talk, about the terror of watching fire close in, about the flood that followed and gutted her home, about a recovery that, for her family, was still very much unfinished. Nobody had planned for that conversation, and that was precisely the point. It was a plain reminder that disaster doesn't live in reports and statistics; it lives in people, and healing starts the moment someone is finally heard.

Day Three: A Gallery Grown From the Ground Itself

The lab closed with an exhibition, curated by Valia Almpani, gathering seven artists who had each metabolised Evoia's landscape into something you could stand in front of. Zoe Lakides used sound and performance to explore what it means to be uprooted and replanted, likening it to a tree pulled from its native soil. Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman built a participatory piece from raw, elemental materials that reimagined extraction and repair, alongside a companion work made from scorched firewood that reclaimed fire as something that binds people together rather than only destroying. Johanna Tinzl staged a silent argument in burnt wood and metal, letting "no" and "yes" face off as a way of asking how communities actually negotiate justice when the climate itself is in crisis.

Eleni Vrettakou built sculptural, half-finished forms out of the very silt, ash and driftwood the disasters had left behind, deliberately exposed to weather and time rather than sealed away. Froso Papadimitriou split her contribution in two, watercolours and digital sketches tracing how ordinary neglect quietly tips into catastrophe, paired with a canvas of white threads stitched by local children, restoring visibility to a relationship with nature that had faded into the background. An independent artist working under the name Omeeros drew a stark line between emotional overwhelm and literal flooding, using soil, live plants and a dehumidifier to ask what happens when care itself grows unbalanced. Giannis Koulouridis, another independent artist, contributed oil paintings that pushed landscape into psychological territory, each canvas a kind of aftermath. And Dear Hunter closed the show with a sprawling, hand-layered map that blended personal testimony with observed geography, an alternative atlas of Evoia built from presence rather than official planning lines.

What Comes After

Three days in Chalcis couldn't undo what fire and flood had done to Evoia, and nobody involved pretended otherwise. What it did do was prove that art doesn't have to arrive after the crisis is over to be useful, it can sit inside the mess, ask better questions, and give people a way to be heard that a policy meeting rarely allows. Artit has already said this isn't a one-time event but a method it intends to carry to other parts of Greece still living with the aftermath of climate disaster. For Evoia, and for everyone who opened their doors and their memories that week, the tracing continues.