Ji.ros

The project Jiros explores the cultural and historical impact of carpet weaving introduced to Greece by refugee women following the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922. These women, bringing centuries of textile expertise, transformed carpet weaving into a significant cultural and economic practice in their new homeland. At its core, the project reinterprets a traditional Anatolian motif, originally designed for the jiros (border) of carpets, repositioning it as the central element. This creative shift questions how peripheral narratives can redefine historical and cultural frameworks.

The woven textile combines historical data with traditional craftsmanship. The background motif visualizes population displacement and resettlement based on 1923 refugee census data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority, illustrating how refugees were distributed across Greece. The central motif, sourced from the archives of the Asia Minor Cultural Center (KEMIPO), was originally a border design drafted on millimeter paper for apprentice weavers. Here, it is elevated to the centerpiece, woven with blue ceramic beads, symbolizing the transformation of marginal elements into focal points.

The project highlights the refugee women’s role as cultural carriers and their contribution to Greece’s artistic and economic landscape. Carpet weaving served as both a means of survival and empowerment, allowing women to navigate the challenges of displacement while preserving their intangible cultural heritage. The integration of archival Anatolian motifs into the design bridges historical and cultural contexts, connecting past experiences to contemporary narratives.

Jiros invites viewers to reflect on the relationship between migration, cultural identity, and applied arts. It raises questions about how traditional art forms can preserve and reinterpret collective memory, offering a renewed perspective on history. The production process—rooted in traditional weaving—embodies the resilience of refugee women, recentering their marginalized stories and honoring their enduring cultural legacy.

photos: Aggelos Hill

Her Voice

The project Her Voice explores the multifaceted concept of Maria Callas’s “voice”. Callas’s unique vocal ability transcended traditional classifications and was deeply tied to her artistic vision and personal convictions. A significant part of her legacy is found in the spartiti (musical scores) she used, annotated with her handwritten notes. These notes reveal how she adapted roles to fit her extraordinary voice, modifying complex compositions to highlight her vocal range and abilities.

The project focuses on the spartito from the finale of Bellini’s Il Pirata, performed by Callas at La Scala in 1958, during a time of professional conflict. In the opera’s climactic scene, where the protagonist succumbs to madness, Callas delivered the line “Look at the macabre scaffold” directly to the theater director, critiquing his management style. This bold act marked her final performance at La Scala and a pivotal moment in her career. The finale of Il Pirata had been entirely restructured by Callas, as she extensively modified the score to align with her vision.

In Her Voice, Callas’s annotations are encoded into perforated cards, similar to those used in musical boxes, which are then employed in a mechanical loom to produce a silk fabric. This fabric serves as a tangible transcription of her modifications, with its color variations symbolizing the nuances of her voice and artistic choices. The work juxtaposes the musical with the material, transforming sound into a visual and tactile narrative.

Through this process, Her Voice reflects on Callas’s voice as a musical phenomenon, an artistic interpretation, and an expression of personal convictions. It invites viewers to consider the interplay between artistry, individuality, and ethical stance, encapsulating her legacy in a material form that bridges sound, performance, and cultural history.

The research was conducted with the support of  Zoi Tzamtzi – Musicologist.

The work was commissioned by the Greek National Opera.

The fabric was produced at Silkline Mouhtaridis

Photos: Valeria Isaeva

On Value

The project centers on the Mendil, a traditional handwoven fabric crafted by women in the Jbala region of northern Morocco, and interrogates its cultural and economic valuation in a tourism-driven economy. Traditionally functional, worn as an apron to protect garments and provide warmth during agricultural work, the Mendil has evolved into a cultural emblem commodified as souvenirs, tablecloths, and bedspreads in tourist destinations. This shift has placed the craft in a precarious position, with male intermediaries exploiting young female artisans by purchasing their work at minimal prices and reselling it for significant profit in urban markets.

Collaborating with Fatima, a young artisan, the project encodes her labor’s value directly into the fabric. Over seven days, a 33-meter-long Mendil was woven, with 30 golden stripes inscribed along its length to represent the 30 euros she earned during the process. This intervention records both the production time and its undervalued compensation, visually emphasizing the economic disparity inherent in the system. By integrating traditional patterns with these encoded elements, the work critiques how tourism commodifies craftsmanship, prioritizing mass production over the preservation of cultural heritage.

The project documents a critical moment of overtourism’s impact, disrupting the craft’s evolution and threatening its historical continuity. It raises questions about how neo-colonialism and the “Western gaze” persist in shaping perceptions of value, often distorting cultural practices to fit commercialized narratives. Through its visual and conceptual approach, the work reveals how the same structures of inequality that have historically marginalized artisans remain unchallenged in contemporary systems.

By weaving together Fatima’s story, the traditional craft of Mendil-making, and the encoded critique of exploitation, the project serves as both a testament to cultural resilience and a call to reevaluate the systems that perpetuate economic and social disparities in the global craft economy.

 

The project was created during Art Explora Mediterannean Crossed Residencies Programme.

Woven Petrography

The project Woven Petrography explores the intersection of geological and cultural heritage on the island of Tinos, focusing on the marble quarry of Agios Eleftherios. The textile created for this work serves as a woven archive, visualizing the chemical composition of the marble based on data from the Hellenic Authority for Geological and Mining Research. The numerical data informs the pattern of the weave, while its color palette is derived from the petrographic characteristics of the stone. The decorative motif incorporated into the textile originates from traditional Tinian lacework (fillet lace), connecting the geological narrative to the region’s craft traditions.

The project examines how the presence of marble on the island shaped gender roles and labor dynamics. While men engaged in the physically demanding work of marble mining, women assumed equally labor-intensive agricultural duties. This redistribution of roles highlights how the materiality of the landscape influenced daily life, bringing women into public labor spaces. By treating the Agios Eleftherios quarry as an autonomous geosite, the project reflects on its role as a silent “observer” of the area’s long geological and cultural history, narrating a temporal snapshot of the region’s evolution.

The textile was created during a residency at the Zarifios Weaving School of Tinos. Using a traditional loom, the artist wove daily alongside with the daily production of the local weavers, incorporating patterns rooted in the island’s craft heritage. The inclusion of lace donated by local women symbolizes the blending of geological data with the cultural narratives of Tinian women.

Woven Petrography raises questions about how natural resources influence cultural practices and identity. It bridges scientific data and craft traditions, creating a dialogue between the material and human histories of the region. Through this process, the project invites viewers to reflect on the interconnectedness of geological and cultural legacies and how these shape collective and individual identities.

Butterflies of the Beautiful

From 17th to 23rd April 2023 artist Maria Varela will be in residence as part of the Temporary Home program for BASE Milano Design Week, with an installation that responds to the themes expressed by the acronym of I.D.E.A. – Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility.

Maria Varela creates butterflies following the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844). Hawthorne’s story depicts the Artist’s battle against the Practical, bringing forward the nature of Art and its creation. Milan Design Week becomes the perfect time to revisit through a current perspective the battle of aesthetics and functionalism. Hawthorne ambiguously plays with the concept of the Cult of Domesticity in the story, a term used to describe new ideas of femininity. Although all women were supposed to emulate this ideal of femininity, black, working class, and immigrant women were at the time (19th century) excluded from the definition.

 

Moreover, it’s considered the first story to contain a robotic insect. Discussing the combination of Art and Technology in different time periods, the work juxtaposes the fantasy of a mechanical butterfly in the past and a machine-learning model to generate a butterfly today.

Maria Varela creates AI-generated butterfly wings and their color composition becomes the visualization of the gender equality data reports by UN Women. During the days of the residency and the exhibition, an improvised loom will be set up and the artist will weave on the spot, demonstrating in real time the methodology of making butterfly wings.

The allegory of the continuous struggle to create a perfect butterfly (the Beautiful) becomes the continuous battle for gender equality in its full potential.

The project is realized in collaboration with Stathis Mitropoulos and The Sustainable Sequin Company.
Commissioned by Onassis Stegi and the British Council as part of the program Circular Cultures.

/ˈfilo/

The installation titled /ˈfilo/ explores the interplay between the wirework silversmithing tradition and the ornamental embroidery of Ioannina, focusing on their shared characteristic—the single, continuous stroke of their designs. Drawing inspiration from the Italian word “filo” (thread or wire), the project examines how these traditional crafts, deeply embedded in Ioannina’s cultural heritage, evolved in parallel and eventually declined. The work questions whether contemporary technologies, like machine learning, can contribute to reinterpreting these crafts.

The project draws upon two traditional techniques: filigree, a method using silver wire to create delicate lace-like patterns, and the intricate gold-thread embroidery of the pirpiri, a luxurious sleeveless coat that symbolized wealth and lineage. The pirpiri was passed down through generations, encapsulating the cultural and familial bonds of Epirotic women. Both techniques reflect a blend of Eastern decorative influences and Western baroque and rococo aesthetics, emblematic of Ioannina’s historical position as a cultural crossroads.

Through extensive research in museum archives and private collections, the artist documented designs from 19th-century artifacts, creating a digital database. This dataset was then used to train a machine-learning algorithm, which generated new patterns by blending the motifs and structures of the two crafts. These algorithmic designs form the basis of the installation, visually manifesting a speculative dialogue between two crafting practices traditionally displayed on women’s bodies.

Installed on the historic walls of Ioannina’s castle, the work symbolizes the transmission of cultural heritage across generations. The blending of human skill and algorithmic design reimagines these traditional crafts not as static artifacts but as living, adaptive practices. By bridging the past with a speculative future, the project invites reflection on how technology can sustain and transform cultural identity through creative reinterpretation.

Technical construction support: Manolis Vitsaxakis

The work is commissioned by Onassis Stegi for the “Plásmata ΙΙ: Ioannina” exhibition.

Photos by Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

kórfos

kórfos: chest as a place to embrace someone

Since the 17th century, Europe’s major silk production centers established an international division of labor, shaping the globalized silk economy. In Greece, silkworm farming and cocoon reeling became key rural activities, with the town of Soufli at the forefront. These tasks were exclusively performed by women, whose relationship with the silkworms was deeply symbiotic. Before incubators were introduced, women would hatch silkworm eggs using the natural warmth of their bodies, holding the eggs close to their bosoms.

The artist revives this traditional incubation method in a video performance, treating it as a pseudo-scientific experiment. She divided the silkworm eggs into three groups of 100 each. The first group was placed in an incubator set to a constant temperature of 36.6°C at the Agricultural University of Athens. The second group was placed in a small box and left to develop at room temperature without any intervention. The third group was placed on her bosom. The goal is to observe and document which of the three conditions is most favorable for hatching.

Silkworm eggs are hatched on her body while oral testimonies of Soufli women who experienced domestic silkworm rearing, along with accounts from the last surviving women silk workers, are played. These stories are accompanied by visuals of silk production, past and present. 

The symbiotic connection between women and silkworms unfolds as a narrative of gendered production systems, offering a “herstory” of material culture.

Interviews

Angeliki Giannakidou – Founder and President of the Ethnological Museum of Thrace
Matoula Demertzi – resident of Soufli
Pagona Manavi – contemporary sericulturer of Soufli
Pepi Mourica – silk worker of the Tzivre factory
Matina Lekka – member of the Chryssallida club
Kula Tsiaduka – silk worker of the Tzivre factory

The work was commissioned by Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative.

woman resting

The representation of a female figure as it was found on a traditional textile, is recorded to the pattern of cross stitch. While motifs were traditionally transmitted visually from generation to generation, in the early 20th century women began recording patterns in a binary code on the  grid, so that they could exchange them with each other. The practice of this recording has been a code of communication and dialogue between women craftsmen for decades.
The woman figure is isolated and lying down on a human scale, as a signal to be communicated.

In Vivo | In Vitro | In Silico

In Vivo | In Vitro | In Silico explores the emerging role of machine learning (AI) in fertility treatments, focusing on the classification and selection of human oocytes. The way this proceed nowadays, oocytes are categorized based on their potential to develop into embryos, with algorithms trained on diagnostic imaging data. Due to the limited availability of real-world data, synthetic datasets are used, where images of oocytes are algorithmically generated to simulate real ones. Machine vision evaluates the texture of oocyte cytoplasm through grayscale analysis of lab images, identifying quality markers that determine their viability.

The project consists of a video and a woven textile. In the video, a generative adversarial network trained on images of real oocytes and the moon simulates synthetic oocytes, blurring the lines between biological reality and digital representation. This visual ambiguity highlights the overlap between the algorithm’s perception and the broader cultural implications of associating the female body with its reproductive potential. The woven textile represents the classification of the artist’s own oocytes, visualizing their texture as interpreted by the algorithm. Data on the oocytes’ quality is translated into a tactile medium, where the weave’s patterns and color shifts encode information about their potential success.

Through these elements, the project raises critical questions about the intersection of technology, biology, and identity. It examines the influence of deep learning algorithms on the female body, shifting the discourse around reproductive value from biological criteria to mathematical predictions. The artist reflects on the ethical implications of such classifications, questioning how machine-mediated sorting of life potential redefines human agency and identity. By transforming data into tangible and visual outputs, In Vivo | In Vitro | In Silico invites the audience to reconsider how technological interventions shape our understanding of life, value, and the female experience.

Scientific supervision: Anna Agapaki
Lab Photography: Vana Gota

 

photos: Mariana Bisti

female ritual dance

The phenomenon of gender-based violence is revealed through a series of femicides, which occur in Greece during 2021. In the first months of 2021 and under home restriction, the social response to the phenomenon was necessarily expressed online and recorded via the hashtag #γυναικοκτονία (#femicide.) This hashtag evolves into a phenomenon itself which is prolonged and escalated, accompanying the phenomenon of crimes.

The work concerns the numeric visualisation of the online posts that used #γυναικοκτονία, as the recording of a collective mourning. Having collected 18 different women’s forms from traditional fabrics, the figures are arranged in a row creating the traditional dance motif. The dance in the traditional fabrics is presented with a sequence of female and male figures in turn. On the contrary, this dance is formed only by women.

The embroidered figures correspond only to the first 100 posts that used #γυναικοκτονία (#femicide), while the rest are presented on the screen. The dance is presented in motion as the phenomenon is in progress.

The project discusses whether mourning can be displayed online and if a hashtag can replace a ritual gesture. Moreover it brings to surface the possibility of metadata classification externalising the collective expression.

photos Thanassis Gatos