FOKIANOU ART SPACE is pleased to present the Eco Flaneur group exhibition ‘Nature and the City‘. The Eco Flaneur group explores issues concerning the public space of the city, nature and the environment, focusing on the combination of art with the formation of ecological consciousness, through the realization of actions and collective works by its members. The Eco Flaneur project, launched in 2022 by Sophia Kyriakou, currently consists of fifteen artists. The group participated in Platforms Project with collective installations in 2023 and 2022. The Flaneur wanders around collecting experiences, events and phenomena. In the exhibition ‘Nature and the City’, on view for three weeks at FokiaNou Art Space, the artists of the group reconstitute and reinvent these two works, inviting the visitor to search and discover his inner world while exploring his relationship with nature, like a contemporary Flaneur.

The artwork entitled ‘What is created in absence’ is a floor installation of successive rows of mosaics that compose a colourful, collective mosaic. The artists of the group collected disparate materials from the public space of cities and the natural environment, each with their own approach and style, making mosaics of the same dimensions, which coexist with each other, bringing to life a fragmentary landscape of a lived space. A lightweight structure suspended from the ceiling and spreading in space like a net, constitutes the installation entitled ‘Brighten UP’, incorporating the disparate works of the group members created through a process of searching for an inner ecology. A collectible recliner that belonged to Alexandros Iolas enables the visitor to lie down and, looking upwards, mentally wander into an inner place of emotions, images, thoughts and imagination.

Each collective artwork is a reflection of the other, from floor to ceiling, just as the world around us reflects and is reflected in an inner place that resides within us. The disturbed relationship of contemporary man with the natural environment has fragmented this place. The Eco Flaneur team through their work attempts to restore it, by collecting and reconstituting its fragments.

Eco Flaneur Participants: Dimitra Exarchou, Penny Gkeka, Antigoni Kapsali, Sophia Kyriakou, Aikaterini Labropoulou, Annette Luycx, Dimitra Maltabe, Apostolos Papageorgiou, Eva Rentzou, Vicky Samouilidou, Chrysa Skordaki, Konstantina Sylikou, Theodora Tsiatsiou, Vivy Tsioga, Panagiotis Voulgaris.

FokiaNou Art Space is an artist-run project space in the intimacy of a small apartment in an old building in the center of Athens. The space encourages collaborative creative efforts between Greek and foreign artists, thereby promoting and supporting the local art community. The space hosts exhibitions, workshops and projects under the direction of two artists, Mary Cox and Panagiotis Voulgaris.

• The exhibition ‘Nature and the City’, of the Eco Flaneur group at FokiaNou Art Space, runs 29 November – 16 December 2023. Opening days and hours: Thursday to Saturday, 17.00 – 20.00; Opening: Wednesday 29 November 2023, 19.00; Presentation – talk: Saturday 2 December 2023, 19.00; FokiaNou Art Space, Fokianou 24, 7th floor, Pagrati, Athens; Metro: Evangelismos.