The glacial surfaces of the world extend to every conceivable horizon, 2025
Book pages, wooden frame, glass
42 X 32 X 2,5 cm

Around a decade ago, the artist’s practice often involved the physical dismantling of encyclopedias, history books, and lexicons. By obsessively tearing pages and extracting spines she sought to expose the manual labor embedded in intellectual authorship. This process became a fragmented, personal form of reading, an intimate re-interpretation of institutional knowledge. During that time, the artist consciously preserved the blank endpapers that tether a book’s body to its cover, as the liminal, transitional space so often ignored.

In The glacial surfaces of the world extend to every conceivable horizon these pages are repurposed to reflect on memory and trauma. Considering stories overlooked by official history books, the work challenges inherited narratives, embraces uncertainty, and invites us to imagine a future unbound from the authority of what has already been written.

The title, an altered phrase from Mark Fisher’s writings on depression and capitalism, evokes an icebound epoch, a remnant of a geological past. Yet amid today’s melting glaciers and climate change, it reads as a dislocated memory, an instance of paramnesia in which the past is misremembered as the present. This temporal dissonance highlights our uncertain relationship to history, time, and ecological reality.

Postcard from New York, 2019-2025
7 instax photos and 6 printed film stills from Theodoros’ performance in New York in 1973

Among the recorded actions shown in Tele-manipulation, we see footage of Theodoros carrying a Matraque-Phallus in the streets of New York and raising it to the sky while pitched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, alluding to skyscrapers as phallic symbols of power. During a recent visit to New York, artist Paky Vlassopoulou performed a feminist version of this gesture for the needs of the work Postcard from New York (2019), replacing the Matraque-Phallus with a rolling pin and wearing a mask made of bread.

This work was created during the artist’s participation in the New York-based visual arts residency programme International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), supported by ARTWORKS through its founding donor, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). The work was sent, in the form of an email, to a curator friend, in which she wrote, among other things: “I am sending you here, from America, from New York, from the dream place of every (western-oriented) artist. From the city that successfully spawns myths and seduces crowds, and where one of our own, a native, tall, handsome artist, walked its streets in 1973 and did what he always enjoyed: feed his arrogance and produce surplus value. So, as I have told you at some point that I would do, I couldn’t help but follow in his footsteps.’
 
Paola Palavidi, Ioannis Koliopoulos, and Dimitris Antoniou helped implement the action.

Acts of dwelling, 2025
series of sculptures
Ceramic, reeds, lime plaster

Acts of Dwelling is a series of sculptures made from clay and living plants, that explores dwelling as an active, embodied practice of inhabiting. Dwelling here is proposed not as a fixed condition but as an ongoing, relational act—both in relation with the environment and with the practical needs of cohabitation and survival. It is a mode of making space that resists static identities and embraces fragility, rootedness, and co-existence.

The sculptural structures are reminiscent of architectural typologies, while the color of the terracotta directly refers to earthen constructions. Soil itself gains symbolic weight as the foundational material: the cavities or “nests” for the reeds are built in a manner that recalls Ampo, an Indonesian snack made of earth, consumed to stave off hunger, though it holds no nutritional value. This act—geophagy—is in some cultures pathologized, yet here it gestures to a primal need, a bodily and psychological hunger. In this sense, soil is not simply substrate but it becomes a reminder, metaphor, and material of vulnerability, interdependence, and the necessity of care. The reeds—living, fragile yet persistent—are integrated as architectural elements, coated in lime plaster, a substance traditionally used to strengthen and preserve building surfaces. In addition, lime has disinfectant properties and is often used on tree trunks to protect them from attacks by wood-eating insects and fungi. This coexistence of strength and the need for protection summarizes the primary condition for habitation.

Wander Lines, 2025
series of ceramic works

In the series of works entitled Wander Lines, Paky Vlassopoulou engages in a form of somatography, a bodily inscription through matter, that resists the primacy of the visual and the linguistic in favor of tactile, affective and situated knowledge.

These works draw inspiration from the radical methodologies of Fernand Deligny (1913–1996), a French thinker and educator known for his pioneering work with non-verbal, autistic children. Rejecting conventional therapeutic frameworks, Deligny developed alternative modes of care based on cohabitation and attentive observation, most notably through his lignes d’erre—drawn traces of the children’s spontaneous wanderings through space. For Deligny, these gestures were not symbolic representations but vital expressions of presence and relation. Echoing this approach, Vlassopoulou does not depict from a distance but rather inhabits material. Her gestures across clay form a quiet choreography of touch, a non-verbal dialogue grounded in movement, repetition and
proximity.

Her practice also resonates with the sensual and conceptual vocabulary of Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, particularly the series Silent Letters. Like Caland’s work, Vlassopoulou’s pieces function as fragments of somatic time—scores marked by the pressure of fingers, the weight of breath, the rhythm of being-with. The resulting compositions do not offer a landscape as image, but as experience: an earthy horizon formed through auto-somatic inscription, where clay becomes a site of memory—of imprint, vibration, and echo.

In this materially intimate and affective register, Vlassopoulou’s language resists disembodied abstraction. Instead, she crafts a space where form is grounded in the sensual, the provisional, and the profoundly relational—an earthbound practice that invites us to feel, rather than interpret, the gestures of connection embedded in the surface of things.

WIND BREAKER, 2024

lime, soil, river sand, rubble, straw, peat, raw and fired umbra natural pigments, linseed oil, stones _ 210 X 270 cm

construction advisor: AITHRIO|architecture, Dimitra Kada

commissioned by Suppressed Creatives for Odera Hotel Tinos, Greece

WIND BREAKER is a natural built sculpture to inhabit, constructed in Tinos island in Greece. The piece is a structure made from stabilized adobe bricks with hydraulic lime, produced on-site in specially designed wooden molds of specific shapes. It is located in a spot where one can see it from all sides while descending the path towards the beach. If someone wishes, they can approach it, enter it to shelter from the strong Tinian winds, meditate, and relax while gazing at the sea. It is inspired by the structure of the artichoke, a characteristic local vegetable of Tinos.

Video documentation link.

images (c) Ioannis Koliopoulos

WE NEED TO DO MORE: magical thinking, 2024

solo exhibition, curated by Olympia Tzortzi @Callirrhoë, Athens

Considering the multifaceted interpretation of the phrase „we need to do more: magical thinking,» Paky Vlassopoulou embraces the notion of magical thinking associated with children’s immersion in fantastical imaginary worlds. This understanding facilitates the development of children’s ability to perceive and interact with the world from diverse perspectives. Through the embrace of magical thinking, children can explore imaginative realms, fostering nuanced understandings of reality. In line with this concept, the artist proposes to revisit this state of mind by creating shelters for various creatures, aiming to cultivate a sense of security and belonging.

(read more)

images (c) Stathis Mamalakis

Thermia Project Residency 2023 in Kythnos Island Greece, curated by Odette Kouzou

Paky Vlassopoulou’s works relate to practices for the prosperity of the “oikos” and the community of bees, the economy of household, and the ways in which humans and bees communicate. The inspiration stems from a mediaeval British custom, called “telling the bees”, in which the family calls upon a beekeeper to inform the bees about the death of a family member, building a relationship of involving the bees in the mourning process. According to this ceremony, the grieving bees assist the passing of the dead to the “other side”, while offering a generous harvest of honey to the family. On the other hand, the bees that have not been told the news, cease to produce honey, or leave the beehive, or even suffer a collective death. Vlassopoulou is inspired by the traditional ceramic beehives in the shape of a cone, reminiscent also to thimbles, and hand-made roof tiles which, when placed across each other hint to the form of a beehive, thus connecting the concept of ‘protection’ with ‘residence’, ‘community’, and who has access to it.

images (c) Dimitris Kokkinogenis & Thermia project

I Have Seen the Moon Rise on Both the Left and Right Side of the Sky, 2023

in situ installation at the Eptapyrgio Fortress, Thessaloniki for the 8th Thessaloniki Biennial

The title of the work, is borrowed from the autobiographical book by the Kurdish-Iranian writer and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani, in which the author recounts his journey, in 2013, alongside other refugees from Indonesia to the Australian external territory of Christmas Island, resulting in Boochani’s four years imprisonment in a migrant detention facility on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

Vlassopoulou’s sculptures explore notions of utility and physicality. The concrete boards set up by the artist create a sense of entrapment and disorientation. The writings on the temporary walls, along the external corridor, refer to the engraved words in the cells of Eptapyrgio, but also to the various markings on trees and benches which serve as presence-declarations. The ceramic spoons and forks, displayed in the enclosed space of the tower, represent a crucial technology for survival. By virtue of their varying sizes, Vlassopoulou suggests their multiple uses, these eating-utensils can also open wedges: for salvation, helping a prison mate widen a window slit; open a door slightly ajar; who knows, even transform inside into outside.

The slit seen in the panel Vlassopoulou created inside the tower is based on the architectural designs of the federal prisons of Chicago, completed in the mid-1970s, Vlassopoulou recreates the minimal opening of the cells’ windows. Slits, in the skyscraper-type correctional institution, are only 2,1 meters-high and feature an opening just 130 mm wide on the concrete walls. This opening is narrow enough to make additional bars redundant, but also wide enough to allow natural light to pass through. Her own constructions are supported by the existing wall. She is interested in this leaning on, this point of contact. The work does not occupy the space, but instead relies on it. Like the former refugees from Asia Minor, who in order to avoid the construction of an extra wall, built their houses parasitically onto the pre-existing walls of the Yedi Kule.

A day after a day after a day after a day, 2023

solo exhibition, curated by Florent Frizet @One Minute Space, Athens

This body of work takes as a starting point Vlassopoulou’s research on Leros island, located in the east of the Aegean Sea and only an hour off the coast of Turkey, and its histories of multi-layered confinement. Leros has a long history of incarceration rooted in its exemplary landscape defined by water and unique architectural heritage. In the area of Lepida, military barracks built during the Italian occupation (1912-1943), have been reused ever since as indoctrination institutions in post-Greek Civil War era (1948-1964), prison cells for political dissidents during the military junta (1967-1974), mental healthcare facilities (1958-today), and refugee camps, known as hotspots (2016-today). Last year, right above the existing infrastructures, on top of the hill, a new controlled refugee camp, with barbed wire fencing, surveillance cameras, x-ray scanners and magnetic doors and gates, was built.

Thinking of the common living conditions of all these very different cases of unwanted bodies, Vlassopoulou is drawn to the plate as an object widely recognized as a symbol of sustenance and as a domestic object linked to material culture. She creates multiple porcelain plates to carry words, lines, scratches. Each plate acts like a journal entry documenting numbers of confinement. In the exhibition space, the plates build up a storyline through drawings, notes and quotations. 

In the middle of the space, two sculptures refer to the marshy ground and the natural flora that surrounds the facilities at Lepida. Although nature is often associated with a sense of freedom, in the case of the inmates the feeling can be very different. The plants act as an additional barrier to a possible escape and exacerbate the feeling of fear.

A day after a day after a day after a day serves as a cognitive and sensorial experience on placement and displacement.

images (c) Thanasis Gatos