Exhibition floor plan

Work descriptions

Paky Vlassopoulou

We Need to Do More: Magical Thinking, 2024 - 2026
Ceramic, unfired clay, terracotta
Various dimensions

“We Need to Do More: Magical Thinking” is comprised of sculptures inspired by the notion of home, shelter and refuge.  A phrase that can be interpreted in several ways, Paky adopts the definition of ‘magical thinking’ associated with children’s ability to create and to immerse themselves in fantastical imaginary worlds. This allows them to perceive and interact with the world from diverse perspectives and engage with reality in more nuanced ways. Here, this magical thinking is applied to what homes could look like beyond the stereotypical four white walls, to reconsider who needs and builds sheltering including non-human animals or insects, and imagine other ways of living together. The artist’s works are exhibited alongside sculptures made by locals and visitors of the village during a two-day workshop at the Fyti Cultural Centre. Participants included children, parents, grandparents, beekeepers, people working in the construction sector, agronomists and farmers. 

Works by: Loizos Olympiou, Chris Sazos, Einat, Omri, Renos Filippou, Christos Chamalis, Christina Christodoulou, Mary Papanearchou, Michael Allayiotis, Dimitris Mitakos, Giorgos, Eleni Fkiara and children from the local and nearby villages.

Biography

Paky Vlassopoulou lives and works in Athens, Greece. Her work is informed by the dialectics of traditional sculpture making in relation to spatial issues, object hood, functionality and bodily experiences. She is concerned with thematics that deal with knowledge production, history, ruins, while in recent years her works revolve around the concepts of proximity, care and hospitality. In 2012, together with artists Chrysanthi Koumianaki and Kosmas Nikolaou, she co-founded 3 137(www.3137.gr), an artist run space operating in Athens, Greece.

Website | Represented by callirrhoë gallery, Athens

Sedef Karayel

Duvarlar Burada Yalan Sylüyor / The Walls Lie Here, 2026
Oil on unstreched canvas
60 x 70 cm
*The painting incurred some damage during transportation.

Untitled, 2025
Oil on Paper
21 x 29,7 cm

Sedef Karayel’s practice explores memory, perception, and loss through intuitive methods, creating layered, atmospheric spaces that serve as sites of excavation. Within these etherial spaces, the body is immersed in an unidentified temporality and becomes-with the ruins and the landscapes. Sedef’s work is a study of haunting. Drawing on her own family history that stems from Agios Ioannis in Paphos, the artist feels the island as a phantomic space where ruins of war, displacement and abandonment call on their shadows and their ghosts to be messengers from a past - ancestors, trees, sheds or wells. These ghostly presences embedded within the ruins create their own time  — a stunted temporality, where life unfolds in spatial confinement and temporal limbo. Her work explores ruination as a result of rupture and violence, and in the context of this exhibition an additional interpretation of ruination is presented; the slower, subtler, yet still violent, ruination of rural depopulation and land abandonment. The dwellings, communities and landscapes formed through centuries of bicommunal agro-sylvo-pastoral systems appear only faintly behind the haze of time.

Biography 

Sedef Karayel (b.1991) works across painting, clay, and image-based processes. Her practice investigates memory, perception, and loss through intuitive methods, constructing layered, atmospheric spaces that function as sites of excavation. Within these spaces, bodily engagement becomes a way of accessing the past beyond fixed or stable narratives. She holds a Master’s degree in Neuroscience and has worked as a PhD fellow researching perception and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, with a particular focus on how prior experience shapes visual perception. This scientific background continues to inform her artistic practice, especially in relation to temporality, subjectivity, and uncertainty.

Website

Mechtild Mayer

Earthenware sculptures
Various dimensions

Mechtild Meyer has been coming to Lasa for thirty years now.  The collection of works exhibited have all been made from earth foraged in this region and fired in an oven she built in her backyard the help of a neighbour, Dimitris. An important source of inspiration for this series of sculptures was a conversation Mechtild had with an elder from Simou a long time ago about the winged goddess who lives on a nearby hill and brings the rain. This myth, in addition to symbolisms and forms of fertility, death and rebirth from the Neolithic period, when early agricultural societies were beginning to form, informed Mechtild’s creations. These winged goddesses are messengers navigating between the spiritual and the material worlds and facilitate the alchemical transformation of matter. These works can also be interpreted through the lens of an old local ritual that required the shedding of a rooster’s blood inside the excavated foundations of new house, or, the daily interactions that birds have with the crevices of stone buildings to plant seeds, find food or make nests. This collection of sculptures speaks of the non-human entities that have shaped folklore as well as our spiritual and material relationships with earth .

Elena Adamou

A. Corporale, 2018/2025
Devoré on silk and viscose velvet, naturally-dyed
129 x 204 cm metal base 200 x 204 x 45cm

A. corporale appears as a landscape, as a scenery, as a veil, as an epidermis over the stone-built exhibition space. The silk and viscose velvet have been etched by the artist with the use of corrosive acid, much like the stones bear the markings of the stonemasons’ tooth chisel — each mark, a testament to hands crafting, making and building. Elena’s landscape reveals patterns that can be recognised while also remaining abstract enough to the viewer’s interpretation. Time is imprinted on matter and takes over the narrative this visual account. What remains are the markings of a hand once present that invite us to connect to matter with feeling, and with our senses. The softness of the velvet and the solidity of the stone although vastly different in their feel, both invite the body to feel safe and held in the space.

Biography 

Elena Adamou lives and works in Nicosia. Elena Adamou’s practice revolves around the intimate dimension of time and the resilience of vulnerable beings. She studied Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where she also completed an MA in Costume Design. She lived and worked in Milan as an artist, performer, and textile laboratory technician until 2021, when she returned to Cyprus. Her practice revolves around the intimate dimension of time and the resilience of vulnerable beings. Her work spans embroidery, textile manipulations, installation, and video.

Website | Represented by The Edit Gallery, Limassol

Peter Eramian

Don’t love your job, job your love, 2026
Concrete, rebar, soil, rocks, clay
147 cm x 40 cm x 50 cm

Visual artist, curator and sculptor Peter Eramian was invited for a short residency to produce a site-specific work for the exhibition ‘Matter & Community’. Across villages in Cyprus, such as Lasa and Fyti, concrete is frequently used to mend and ‘modernize’ stone-built buildings. Although seen as a quick fix, this practice may cause more damage by suffocating the stone, while also eroding the island's stone-built heritage. The artist conceived a sculptural work inspired by this habit while continuing his inquiry into the use, mis/use, and over/use of concrete, and its enmeshment with industrial, ecological, and aesthetic unravelings. Produced in Lasa and moved to Fyti over two weeks, Peter’s sculptures took on a performative, durational aspect, meanwhile starting conversations with locals about aesthetics, process, labour, and the energy this material demands of the body, machinery, and the earth’s resources. The two unearthed concrete sculptures, formed from soil, rocks, and chunks of raw clay, suggest a dialectical tension between the earth and human activity. Two of the most common reasons, or excuses, for using concrete is that it is cheap and practical. This work embraces the heaviness of concrete in every sense of the word and confronts the paradox of ‘fair face’ concrete, by stripping it of its practicality to create an uncanny rendition of an item we use at home on a daily basis, the chair — transforming it into a purely sculptural intervention.

Biography 

Peter Eramian (b.1984, Nicosia) is an artist and curator whose practice revolves around the politics of matter, labour and the body. In 2018 he completed the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, where he focused on the compounding properties of concrete and the sealing properties of plastics. Peter has been co-running the artist-led project space Thkio Ppalies together with Stelios Kallinikou since 2015. Previously, he was founding editor of The Cyprus Dossier and Shoppinghour Magazine. He was part of the curatorial team of the project “The Broken Pitcher”, together with Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Marina Christodoulidou, and represented Cyprus at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 collaboratively with Emiddio Vasquez as Lower Levant Company, together with Endrosia Collective and Haig Aivazian, with the project “On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…”.

Website

Elina Ioannou

Drywall on Stone, 2026
Calcareous sandstone of the Achna Formation, coloured pencils, metal
160 × 53 × 82 cm

Visual artist and sculptor Elina Ioannou presents a new work, produced on the occasion of this exhibition. Drywall on Stone merges Elina’s studies in drawing and architecture with her sculptural practice for an exploration of the trompe l’oeil (trick on the eyes) techniquewhereby the illusion of depth is created on a flat surface. Inspired by the ‘diseases of a stone’, as explained by art critic Adrian Stokes in The Pleasures of Limestone, the artist introduces chemical reactions, processes of weathering and decay onto stone with pencil. Various stone arrangements are also drawn, playing with the depth and density of stone-built structures on a two-dimensional slab of sandstone. The perfectly rounded holes, or magnified pores, allow for air and light to pass through piercing the optical illusion and serving as a reminder that stone breathes. The architectural features of this work echo the ad-hoc changes and DIY additions homeowners of traditional houses make over time to meet their needs, their shifting aesthetic preferences or to create spaces more attuned to the needs of contemporary life.  

Biography

Elina Ioannou (b.1979, Cyprus) initially trained in Architecture and Design before pursuing Fine Arts at École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, France. Her practice involves a wide range of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture and installations.She has presented her work in numerous group and solo shows, art fairs and biennales. Selected exhibitions: «Our Creative Diversity: Kairos», 13th Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Puglia, Italy, 2008; «Project Room I, Caught in The Act», (solo show), NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2008; Salon Du Dessin, Montpellier, France, 2012; «Guilty As Charged», (solo show), city hall of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, France, 2012; «1, 2, 3, b4», Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2013; South & West Facade (Stone Slabs No. 1–20 and 21-37), (solo show), Hermes Stores, Athens, Greece, 2015. Her work can be seen in public spaces including an installation in the main plaza of Kyperounta village and the patio of Lanitio Gymnasium, at the Cyprus State collection, at the collection of Phileleftheros newspaper, at the collection of MOMus museum of contemporary art Thessaloniki. Ioannou has done several collaborations including Hermès Paris, Camper and CasmperLab, Marriott International, VisitCyprus, and Phileleftheros newspaper.

Website 

Paris Christodoulou

Lasa 1, Lasa 2 & Lasa 3 | 2026
Four-colour silkscreen print and two-colour silkscreen print on stones
Variable dimensions

This body of work comprises two stone diptychs and a silkscreen print created specifically for this exhibition. Paris built on his ongoing practice of experimenting with silk-screen printing on material sourced from abandoned or ruined dwellings, first explored for his solo show Uneven Fields at Decade. For this exhibition, the artist sourced stones from ruins of houses and dry-stone walls in Lasa and imprinted on them photographs he took from these sites. The prints on the stones bear the presence of an almost fluorescent green, as if moss has begun growing on the stone, or the weeds that have taken over the ruin are now sprouting from within the rock. Interested in the more-than-human presences in areas where human activity has disappeared, Paris’s stone diptychs suggest that life does thrive within ruins — it’s just not human. Although modernity arrived to the village, evidenced by the electricity wires disappearing into the earth; in hindsight, it seems to have been a futile attempt to keep people from emigrating. The rural exodus coincided with a plethora of technological advances, but left a series of ghosts in its path. One of these are the markings on stone left by the builders on the stones, which in many ways became a historical document since stone-building was stopped soon after electricity arrived, since the widespread use of concrete followed soon after. Paris flattens the carvings in stone to create a pattern that operates like an optical illusion, destabilising the eyes’ ability to focus and eliciting the sensation of a dream-scape.  

Biography

Paris Christodoulou’s practice explores visual perception as a situated and embodied process through which we understand place, history, and our relationships with human and more-than-human worlds. Working across printmaking, photography, installation and site-based research, his work examines how knowledge is produced, disrupted and reconfigured through acts of looking. Using a geometric visual language - compressed, extended, inverted, and multiplied - and combining traditional hand processes with digitally developed patterns, he creates immersive environments that invite viewers to engage with large-scale, site-specific and often temporary installations that disrupt the apparent stability of vision. Evoking the retinal effects of Op Art, these works shift attention from certainty to relation, unsettling anthropocentric assumptions that position human experience as the primary measure of reality.

Website

RIK Video Archive

Week of Traditional Architecture , 19/01/1979, black and white, audio, 00:10:03

RIK contributor Andreas Xinaris, as part of the program “For the Countryside,” speaks with village residents about the preference for building modern homes rather than preserving traditional architecture.

The traditional home Xanthos Hatzisotiriou, 20/01/1970, black and white, audio, 00:03:07

Xanthos Hatzisotiriou presents “Monastiri,” his home and studio in Famagusta, and shares his views on the preservation of folk architecture.