North Aegean Stories
Art Creation in Place
In early spring 2024 Christina Sgouromiti (Athens School of Fine Arts) and Dimitris Krallis (SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies, Simon Fraser University) connected on account of their common interest in and love of Molyvos. An artist and a historian therefore opened discussions focused on the history and culture of Molyvos. These conversations were enriched by engagement with the rich Molyvos-based family archive held by Mariza Krallis. Mariza had been studying this unique document trove a few years now and together with Dimitris she was beginning to prepare it for digitization under what came to be the Aegean Stories Vault.Â
With all that in mind, Christina and Dimitris teamed up and, with support from Gefyra (the collaborative SFU/UCLA grant) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at SFU, they assembled a collective of students from both the Athens School of Fine (4) Arts and SFU (5), who travelled to Molyvos in June 2024 and together reflected and created, inspired by the history and culture of Molyvos and Northern Lesvos in general and the archive in particular. In the summer of 2025 the team hosted an exhibition at the S. Tryphon Arts Foundation in Molyvos, where the Archive, the creative output, and the students gaze on Lesvos, its history, and culture were put on display, along with local arts and crafts and relevant artistic and research-focused video-installations.Â
Thinking about our collaboration we might say that treated Molyvos in particular, and Lesvos more broadly, as places where engaging with Greek culture in place takes on meaning and becomes productive. We saw Lesvos, historically a space where Greek culture meets the people and intellectual/artistic influences of Asia and the Near East, as an ideal meeting place for thinkers and students from Greece and beyond.
Images from the Opening
Contributing Artists
Christina Sgouromiti is a Faculty Member at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in the Department of Visual Arts and holds a PhD in Art Theory and History from the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Department of Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean. Her research focuses on artists’ communities from the turn of the century until 1960, in Southeastern Europe (2016, Cum Laude). After graduating with a BA Hons in Painting (2002), she completed the MA course in Drawing at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London (2004). Since 2007 she has exhibited her work in numerous solo and collective shows and presentations, both in Greece and abroad.
Anastasia Pavlopoulou was born in Athens and studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She trained under Aggelos Antonopoulos at the First Painting Studio and simultaneously attended courses in Byzantine iconography techniques and fresco painting, guided by Dimosthenis Avramidis at the Byzantine Iconography Studio.Her work is deeply rooted in personal imagery and memory. Color plays a central role in her artistic process—it is the primary driving force behind her compositions. Her palette defies the constraints of naturalistic representation, embracing expressive freedom over realism.Music, particularly rock and electronic sounds, serves as a complementary influence, often translated into gestural brushwork and dynamic energy on the canvas. Her style is characterized by a deconstruction of form through the segmentation of color and deliberate gestures, resulting in vivid, playful compositions where abstraction and figuration coexist.
Sofia Damouli Plaini was born in Athens. She has been studying at the Athens School of Fine Arts since 2020. In her art she uses a variety of expressive media and her work, as a whole, deals with the poetic function of landscape and explores the intersection between nature, myth, and emotion. In 2024, she joined the group of students from the Athens School of Fine Arts and Simon Fraser University that visited Molyvos and placed her art in dialogue with medieval and contemporary literary and historical contexts. The outcome of this dialogue may be followed here. For the purposes of this exhibition she shared with the curator a collection of photographs and drawings that highlight the connections between the island’s natural landscape and its literature. Moreover, she exhibited an object of ceramic art created in dialogue with local, functional ceramic traditions.
Nikos Pyromalis notes is in his fourth year at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He notes: “When I find peace at home, I realize how closely connected I am to my surroundings and the community around me. Pigeons, a daily presence in the urban landscape, embody this connection. In the morning, they roam freely under the warm sunlight, while in the evening they seek a safe and high refuge. However, even when I feed them and they form large shapes, their transience becomes apparent when these shapes dissolve on the dirty street in the city center. This geometry of our city can remind us of the ephemeral nature of our connections and the transience of our reality.”
AEGEAN STORIES VAULT
North Aegean Stories
- Achliptarouda
- Administrative Continuities
- Allilodiplografia
- Barbarossa
- Daphnis and Chloe
- Dowry Contract & Residence Permit
- Education in the Ottoman Archives
- Egyptian Photo Parlours
- Egyptian stories
- Eleftheriadis: Paris/London
- E. Schmidt on Painted Houses
- Figures from Byzantine Lesvos
- Global Fashions
- Lomemili and Genoese trade
- Conze and Humann in Molyvos
- Nature in Lesvos
- C. T. Newton in Mytilene
- Ottoman Yearbooks
- Postcards
- Smyrna Photo Parlours
- S. Adam on Education in Lesvos
- Seismic Shifts
- Thinking about the state
- War Trauma
- Seals, Authentication and Identity
- A Medical Diploma and a world of connections
- The Vampire of Mytilene
- Women and Memory in Molyvos
Historial Background
Art Creation in Place
- Dimitris Krallis
- Mariza Krallis
- Aytek Soner Alpan
- Maria Mandamadiotou
- Aneurin Ellis-Evans
- Christina Sgouromiti
- Soloup (Antonis Nikolopoulos)
- Yannis Tentzeris
- Ethan Schmidt
- Nina Houle
- Sam Adam
- Emrecan Çelik
- Gregory Tsolakis
This project was supported by an SFU FASS Kickstarter Grant, by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU and by Gefyra, an SNF-funded collaboration between SFU and UCLA.
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