In July 2026, I arrived on Othonoi, a small island in the Ionian Sea and the westernmost inhabited point of Greece, to take part in the Ionian Lab residency, organized by Space52 and Kalogerou1844. I did not arrive with a finished artwork in mind. I knew I wanted to work with the landscape, but I wanted the place itself to tell me what kind of image it could hold.
One memory was already following me there. During a conversation in 2025 about hydrocarbon exploration in the Ionian Sea, a resident had described what earlier survey activity felt like from inside her home. She told me that at night she could feel the vibrations and that the whole house was shaking. I kept thinking about that sentence. It made something distant and technical suddenly physical. Offshore exploration was no longer only a map, a concession block or a political debate. It could enter a house. It could be felt in the body.
On Othonoi, I spent time looking at Aspri Ammos beach. The beach is striking: white stones, rough rock formations and a horizon that feels unusually open. It faces toward Block 2 in the northern Ionian Sea, an area connected to offshore hydrocarbon exploration, roughly ten kilometres away. That fact changed the way I looked at the view. The horizon was beautiful, but it was no longer neutral.
The first sketches for The Hunt came from the rocks themselves. Their irregular forms reminded me of very early image making, of marks that could belong to another time. I began drawing figures inspired by prehistoric cave paintings: hunters with spears, reduced to simple lines. At some point, the image shifted from the rocks to the ground. I imagined two hunters facing not an animal, but the silhouette of a contemporary offshore oil platform.
That was the moment the work became clear to me.
I was interested in putting two forms of extraction into the same image. Hunting is one of the oldest relationships between humans and the natural world. Offshore drilling belongs to an entirely different technological era, but it is also built around taking resources from the environment. I did not want the work to give a simple answer about who is the hunter and who is the prey. I preferred to leave that relationship unresolved.
The final installation covered around 500 square metres of the beach. I used strips of black geotextile, placed and partly covered with sand to form the figures and the platform. From the ground, the work was difficult to understand as a complete image. You could see fragments: a line, a spear, a section of a body. Only from the air did the scene become fully legible.
This changed the way I worked. I had to move constantly between the beach and the drone image. We would place material, fly the drone, look at the proportions, return to the ground and make corrections. A line that looked right from a few metres away might become completely wrong from above. The process was slow and physical. There was no screen on which I could simply resize an element. Every correction meant walking back across the beach and changing the work by hand.
For me, this distance between the experience on the ground and the image from above became part of the meaning. Many environmental decisions are also experienced this way. From a distance, they are plans, numbers, maps and technical language. On the ground, they become places where people swim, live, work, remember and grow old.
Something unexpected happened during the installation. Some visitors to the beach were initially more concerned about the black material than about the image itself. They asked whether it could damage the beach. I understood the concern. Once I explained that the material was removable and that everything would be taken away, the conversation changed. We walked toward the rocks and looked back at the work. Then the attention moved from what was temporarily lying on the beach to what the artwork was pointing toward: the offshore horizon.
That reversal stayed with me. A temporary artwork could look disruptive because it was visible, while a much larger possible transformation could remain abstract because it was still far away or had not yet happened.
This is also why it was important for The Hunt to disappear. After the photographic and video documentation was completed, all the material was removed and the beach was returned to its previous state. The artwork existed physically for a very short time. What remains is the image, the documentation and perhaps the question it leaves behind.
I often work with temporary interventions because I am interested in the difference between an artwork that is deliberately ephemeral and changes that may become permanent. In The Hunt, that contrast is central. The figures on the beach were removed. The debate represented on the horizon continues.
I do not think art can replace scientific research, journalism, environmental policy or activism. It does something different. It can take information that feels distant and give it a form that people encounter emotionally and visually before they fully understand it intellectually.
The Hunt was my attempt to create such an image: two figures from a distant human past standing on a Greek beach and facing a possible industrial future.
The scene is simple, almost primitive. But the question behind it is not.
What are we hunting now, and what might we lose in the process?
