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Invitation and Program of the event
MATCH in Athens, “Manifesting~”
Three Days of Ecology, Art, and Research
24–26 April
Isadora and Raymond Duncan Dance Research Centre
Chrysafi 34, 162 32 Vyronas, Greece
Friday 24 April · 12:00–14:00
Exploring water and fire ecologies ~ Reconnecting with bodies of water, visiting and weaving burned territories.
Talk at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture,
with Nicholas Anastasopoulos, Annalisa Zegna, Garance Maurer
RSVP
Friday 24 April · 17:30–19:00
The movement of water
Walk along the Pikrodafni stream with Anna Tzakou, Sylvain Maestraggi and Annalisa Zegna
RSVP
Saturday 25 April · 10:00–14:00
The condition of burned land
Ecopoetic walk in the burnscar in Parnitha Forest with Garance Maurer
RSVP
Saturday 25 April · 17:30–19:00
The question of the nature of our nature
Discussion and exchange
Duncan Dance Centre
Saturday 25 April · 19:00–22:00
Presentation of works
Annalisa Zegna, Garance Maurer, Vitoria Kotsalou
Music by Maya Aghniadiz and the K.A.P.I. Vyrona choir, dir. Giota Sangvinatsou
Duncan Dance Centre
Sunday 26 April · 11:00–14:00
Garden celebration
Open to the community, researchers, artists, and the wider public
Duncan Dance Centre and neighbouring EYDAP aqueduct garden
A tea ceremony connecting plants, senses, and grief, presented in Berlin during the Symposium BURNING SILENCE.
The ceremony will happen during the walk in Parnitha ‘The condition of the burned land’ and a second time in the garden of the DDRC durning the week-end.
The felted wool carpet reads: THINGS THAT TAKE TIME ARE GOOD. Woven from Greek wool, it will return to Greek land: laid at the foot of the young Valonia Oak planted in the garden in October 2025, a tree chosen for its endemic roots and its capacity to slow the spread of fire. There, it will hold moisture, signal the presence of the tree, and slowly decompose. It will become earth. On the carpet, ceramic cups glazed with ash from California burnscars hold a tea gathered from three landscapes: a garden in France, a Berlin cemetery turned urban farm, herbs from Greece. Wool carries the memory of pastoral fire: of prescribed burns, of hands that sheared and cared. In this gesture, material becomes offering. A slow, faithful act of tending to what grows.
"There is a reality with which we come into direct contact only through our spontaneous experiences. It is a reality of boundless richness."
— Arne Naess
Vitoria Kotsalou in the garden, A day out of time.
DETAILED PROGRAM:
MATCH is a European programme that examines the Mediterranean as a region that is severely affected by climate change. Through artistic practices and participatory actions, it supports processes of learning and knowledge exchange, specifically addressing the Mediterranean climate and its cultures, and highlights ways of life that sustain community and move in harmony with nature.
Within this framework, MATCH develops a programme of artistic residencies in Cyprus, Greece, France, Spain and Turkey, with the participation of artists responding to this urgent condition. In collaboration with artistic organisations and community gardens, practices are developed and works are created that connect climate change, culture and art.
In the Athens programme, artists Annalisa Zegna, Garance Maurer and Vitoria Kotsalou came together to explore the Duncan Dance Centre's community garden and the surrounding EYDAP aqueduct garden as a space for movement, reflection and listening to the rhythms of the everchanging Mediterranean. Over the past six months, they investigated the ecologies of water and fire, the connections between people, land and memory. They observed the direct effects of climate stress and applied practices of care, resilience and imagination.
On 24, 25 and 26 April, as the culmination of their research, the three artists present a programme of exploration into the themes they have touched upon. Using tools, technologies and tangible outcomes from their practices, they invite a diverse group of researchers, artists and scientists from a variety of fields to participate and co-shape a ground for learning, action and thought.
The gathering forms a shared space. Time we spent together will be considered as active research, proposing networking, exchange and experiential practices as an antidote to the passage of climate change.
The artworks, beyond this presentation, become a reason to meet: the three days of actions offer a multifaceted entry into our relationship with nature, giving each participant the opportunity to encounter and share urgent questions from their own practice, their own fields of thought or action.
The programme consists of five interconnected sessions - a modular process of multilayered experiential engagement with the theme of climate change. It proposes movement, both metaphorically and literally, as a way of connecting, reorienting and envisioning. By introducing a cyclical rhythm, we observe, listen, interconnect, act across three different landscapes, following water, fire and the ecology of a garden.
1. The movement of water
Friday 24 April · 17:30–19:00 · Walk along the Pikrodafni stream
Annalisa Zegna’s research project explores water ecologies through the natural cycles that sustain life on Earth, increasingly threatened by climate change and extractive capitalist policies. Following water as a relational body connecting all living systems, the research revealed the complex connections between Athens’s water needs and the surrounding territory, with particular attention to water infrastructure, rivers that have disappeared beneath the urban fabric, and regional lakes that are gradually drying up.
Pikrodafni is the last remaining stream in southern Attica to have been preserved in its natural form. It rises on the western slopes of Hymettus and flows into the Saronic Gulf. It is one of the few rivers crossing Athens's urban landscape that has retained, along most of its length, its original course and vegetation, offering exceptional examples of wildlife. The walk along the Pikrodafni stream — with the generous contribution of Anna Tzakou, Sylvain Maestraggi and Annalisa Zegna — is an invitation to reflection and observation. The route connects us topologically with the area of the Duncan Dance Centre and activates a different, embodied awareness of our relationship with the landscape and the green corridor it creates. Now no longer open to the public.
2. The condition of burned land
Saturday 25 April · 10:00–14:00 · Ecopoetic walk in the burnscar in Parnitha Forest
Garance Maurer is presenting an extract of her ongoing Pyroscapes project, where she develops a practice of visiting and becoming-with fire to understand its complex dynamics and weave ways of staying with the fire (in the sense of Harraway’s Staying with the Trouble).
Exploring the surroundings of Athens by visiting burnscars of recent fires in Parnitha and Penteli, visiting islands to understand key topics related to fires (Aegina, Chios, Lesvos), Garance connected the ecology of the garden to the greater mediterranean ecology and to fire ecology. Her research for MATCH is deeply connected to fire culture and to practices of caring for the land.
For this action, Garance sets out a key site in her research, the burned section of Parnitha, inviting us on an immersive visit to this now inaccessible part of the mountain, transforming the landscape into a field of reflection and reappraisal of what is "burned," through listening practices, walking and discussion.
3. The question of the nature of our nature
Saturday 25 April · 17:30–19:00 · Duncan Dance Centre
The Duncan Dance Centre and the neighbouring EYDAP aqueduct garden open to the group of researchers and the wider public. Discussions and exchange practices are hosted to surface observations, strategies and shifts in the frameworks that shape our thinking and the way we move at this critical moment, amid environmental and political crisis. Οur relationship with the nature of nature comes to the foreground.
4. Presentation of works
Saturday 25 April 19:00-22:00 Duncan Dance Centre
Annalisa Zegna, Garance Maurer and research presentation by Vitoria Kotsalou.
In Annalisa Zegna’s works, water is investigated as a fluid body able to transport and retain substances, microorganisms, and micro-pollutants, but also as a transformative force, carrying memories and potential futures, reminding us that we are all porous organisms and interconnected worlds. Her practice highlights the deep entanglement of landscapes and bodies, revealing continuous processes of transformation and metamorphosis.
Through her works, she invites reflection on our entangled relationship with water, landscapes, and the living systems that sustain us. An audiovisual installation guides the viewer through key energetic sites encountered during the artist’s journey to the lakes of Greece that supply potable water to the city of Athens; a sound work offers an interspecies meditation, leading the listener through encounters and metamorphoses; some terracotta objects are installed in the garden trees, conceived as infrastructures for the living: bird nests made from wild clays collected during field explorations, then shaped and fired to retain moisture and host other forms of life.
Garance Maurer’s transdisciplinary, translocal project looks at intentional fires (controlled, prescribed, traditional burns) as a counterpoint to the megafires of the Pyrocene era. Learning from different communities, Garance recognises fire as a process of transformation, regeneration, revolution, and revelation in a context where it is predominantly seen and lived as threatening and destructive.
Using textile as medium and metaphor, she presents patchworks, printed fabrics, video, and objects made with foraged elements - natural dyes, ashes, calcinated soils, pigments - from Mediterranean landscapes across California, Italy, Portugal, and France, conversing with the elements she discovered in Greece during her MATCH residency at the Duncan Dance Research Center.
Exploring the surroundings of Athens by visiting burnscars of recent fires, she highlights pyrophilous plants adapted to fire cycles, questions our relationship to deep time, and examines the cultural and material dimensions of wool, a material that, through its origin and artisanal use. She also used technological devices such as thermal cameras as a way to gain another perspective and sensitivity, to measure the climatic aspect of the things observed: a forest, a dancing body generating its own heat, and the reaction of skin to shadow, wind and topography, as an attempt to empathize with vegetal embodiment.
In Vitoria Kotsalou’s work, our relationship with the nature of nature emerges as a continuous, layered question of orientation amidst uncertainty. In her practice, body, mind, imagination, and relationships are not separate entities but porous, interconnected fields, within which humans exist as intermediaries in a wider ecosystem of neural, bodily, and social interactions.
At the heart of her work is movement—a rhythm that shapes how we breathe, think, connect, observe, and act. Kotsalou’s practice focuses on what she calls “bare activity”: a primary form of activation that precedes deliberate action, where the body engages directly with the world’s potential. In this space, the interplay of sensation, movement, and transformation comes alive, revealing the profound entanglement of inner and outer landscapes.
Through bodily, multisensory, and verbal narratives, she offers a “technology of orientation”: a set of tools for standing, listening, and moving within moments of fluidity. This approach invites us to reconsider our relationship with the present and to ask: Where are we headed? What kind of nature are we cultivating?
Drawing on her “satellite” perspective of the MATCH program and her immersive experience in Duncan’s garden, Kotsalou creates a methodology that transforms experience into a field of knowledge and ongoing learning. It nurtures our capacity to be present with unfolding events, to perceive shifts, and to ask: Where are we tending? What kind of nature do we help grow? What dynamic life emerges from our active participation in this ever-changing field?
Through multisensory practices, it proposes a “technology of orientation” for how we exist and move within fluidity. Music by Maya Aghniadiz and the K.A.P.I. Vyrona choir participates under the direction of Giota Sangvinatsou.
The evening unfolds through discussions, readings, and exchange practices, creating a shared space for coexistence and dialogue. It proposes collectivity and lived experience as ways of approaching the climate crisis.
5. Garden celebration
Sunday 26 April · 11:00–14:00 · Duncan Dance Centre and neighbouring EYDAP aqueduct garden
The garden opens to the community of the Municipality of Vyronas, the group of researchers, the scientific and artistic community, and the wider public. With the participation of children and adults alike, the garden becomes a social mechanism that generates and offers material and spiritual goods. Manual work, dance and food — practices that promote reciprocity, community and ecological balance — come together to form a direct, sustainable alternative.
The closing of the journey celebrates the world as a gift and shapes images and frameworks in which people hold the responsibility to give back.
More information in Greek here, here, here or here.
︎︎︎ RSVP: We would kindly ask you to let us know of your attendance by filling in this form. ︎︎︎
For any questions and further information please contact ddrc.garden@gmail.com
The actions are part of the European programme Mediterranean as the Climate Hotspot (MATCH) and are realised with the support of the Ministry of Culture.
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