The MARes in Hybrid Arts program of the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University, cordially invites all interested parties to attend the public defense of the following Master’s thesis:
Thesis Title:
Where The Water Flows: Land Carries What It Was Told To Forget
Candidate:
Myrto Papadopoulos
Supervisor:
Maria Chalkou
Date & Time:
Friday, 25 September 2026 — 13:00–14:30 Greece
Join via Zoom:
https://ionio-gr.zoom.us/j/97898788982
Examination Committee
- Maria Chalkou — Associate Professor, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University
- Dalila Honorato — Professor, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University
- Daphne Dragona — Assistant Professor, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University
About the Thesis
Where The Water Flows: Land Carries What It Was Told To Forget is an interdisciplinary artistic research project tracing loss and regeneration in the relationship between people and land—in soil, practice, and memory. Developed through sustained fieldwork in Lakonia, in the southeastern Peloponnese, the research brings together cultural anthropology, environmental studies, analog photography, archival practice, and moving image. At its centre are three members of one family—a shepherd and two farmers—whose different relationships with the same landscape embody tensions within contemporary land-based practice. Drawing on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Traditional Ecological Knowledge as conceptual lenses rather than templates, the research considers reciprocity, embodied transmission, and understandings of land as a living system. An experimental archive brings photographs, film, text, and living material into relation through a cyclical rather than linear structure, reflecting processes of regeneration in the soil and transmission across generations. The thesis ultimately asks whether sustainability can be understood as an ecological question alone, or whether it must also encompass the people whose labour and knowledge sustain the land.
About the Candidate
Myrto Papadopoulos is a Greek photographer and visual artist based in Athens. Her practice develops at the intersection of documentary photography, anthropology, and artistic research, with a particular focus on how identity, belonging, and relationships to land are formed, remembered, and transformed. Her methodology combines sustained fieldwork with analog photography, archival practice, video, sound, and text. She trained first as a painter at AUTh and later in documentary photography at ICP in New York. She teaches visual narratives and contemporary documentary practices in academic contexts. Her work has been presented in cultural institutions, academic environments, and public forums including TEDx, the European Parliament, and Princeton University's Global Seminar. She was an IMEDD Fellow in 2019 and 2021 and has been nominated for the Prix Pictet, the Magnum Foundation Grant, and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
Attendance
The defense is open to the public. Students, researchers, artists, and all interested individuals are welcome to attend.
