DEO

«DEO» is not an acronym! It is another name for Demeter, the goddess of harvest and fertility in Greek mythology. The name holds a gentle story: In the 1920s, a woman in southern Chios opened a small hotel. She named it “Demeter,” honoring agriculture and growth, as a mastic producer herself. The hotel became more than a place to stay: traveling theatre groups arrived, teachers passed through, strangers met, a small cultural ecosystem emerged! That woman was the grandmother of Akis Kokkinos, DEO’s founder ♡ The spirit of that place lives on: today, DEO shapes a meeting point on Chios, where different communities come together through contemporary art. 🐾 //////// Το όνομα «DEO» δεν είναι ακρωνύμιο! Είναι ένα εναλλακτικό όνομα της Δήμητρας, της θεάς της σποράς και της γονιμότητας. Η ονομασία του οργανισμού μας κρύβει πίσω της μια τρυφερή ιστορία: Tη δεκαετία του 1920, μια γυναίκα στα νοτιόχωρα της Χίου άνοιξε ένα μικρό ξενοδοχείο. Το είπε «Δήμητρα», τιμώντας τη θεά-προστάτιδα της γεωργίας, καθώς ήταν και η ίδια μαστιχοπαραγωγός. Το ξενοδοχείο εξελίχθηκε σε κάτι περισσότερο από τόπο φιλοξενίας: περιπλανώμενοι θεατρικοί θίασοι της εποχής, τα «μπουλούκια», διασταυρώνονταν με δάσκαλους και εμπόρους που πηγαινοέρχονταν, αλλά και με κάθε είδους περαστικούς. Ένα μικρό, ζωντανό, πολιτιστικό οικοσύστημα είχε γεννηθεί. Η γυναίκα εκείνη ήταν η γιαγιά του Άκη Κόκκινου, του ιδρυτή της DEO ♡ Το πνεύμα του ξενοδοχείου «Δήμητρα» παραμένει ζωντανό: Σήμερα, η DEO χτίζει μια εστία συνάντησης πάνω στη Χίο, ένα σημείο αναφοράς, όπου ποικιλόμορφες κοινότητες διασταυρώνονται μέσα από τη σύγχρονη τέχνη. 🐾

We are proud to announce that the 2026 DEO summer programme will take place in the traditional settlement of Volissos, in north-west Chios! As a gesture of solidarity with the local communities, this year DEO will set up a base in the largest village of Amani, a region that has suffered multiple hardships, culminating in last summer’s devastating wildfires. The DEO 2026 summer exhibition will be hosted at the historical school of Volissos, a two-storey, stone-built, century-old listed building that survived the wildfire. Volissos School is the only remaining public school operating within an area of 15,800 hectares. Join us on Saturday 11 July to celebrate the highly anticipated exhibition opening, and stay tuned for details about the curatorial framework and participating artists, as well as the public programme activities! We would like to extend our deepest appreciation to our patrons, whose invaluable contributions help bring this celebration of contemporary art to life. Photos/videos: Nelo Meci @nelomeci / Kelly Katsarou @kellykatsarou / @meciproduction ////// Με χαρά ανακοινώνουμε ότι το θερινό μας πρόγραμμα για το 2026 θα πραγματοποιηθεί στη Βολισσό, τον επιβλητικό παραδοσιακό οικισμό της βορειοδυτικής Χίου! Σε μια χειρονομία αλληλεγγύης, η DEO αποβιβάζεται στο κεφαλοχώρι της Αμανής, περιοχή που τα τελευταία χρόνια δοκιμάζεται ποικιλοτρόπως. Αποκορύφωμα οι καταστροφικές πυρκαγιές του περσινού καλοκαιριού. Χώρος φετινής φιλοξενίας της DEO είναι το σχολείο της Βολισσού: ένα πέτρινο, διατηρητέο, διώροφο κτίριο-κόσμημα που μετρά έναν αιώνα και το οποίο επέζησε από την πυρκαγιά. Πρόκειται για το μοναδικό εν λειτουργία σχολείο στην Αμανή, μια έκταση 158 χιλιάδων στρεμμάτων, και στεγάζει γυμνάσιο με λυκειακές τάξεις, δημοτικό και νηπιαγωγείο. Σας προσκαλούμε το Σάββατο 11 Ιουλίου να γιορτάσουμε μαζί τα εγκαίνια της φετινής μας εικαστικής έκθεσης. Μείνετε συντονισμένοι για να μάθετε τους συμμετέχοντες καλλιτέχνες, τις παράλληλες δράσεις και, φυσικά, τον τίτλο! Εκφράζουμε τις θερμότερες ευχαριστίες μας στους υποστηρικτές μας, με την πολύτιμη συμβολή των οποίων πραγματοποιείται αυτή η γιορτή σύγχρονης τέχνης. Φωτό/βίντεο: Nέλο Μέσι / Kέλλυ Κατσαρού

Eτοιμάζοντας πυρετωδώς το έκτο θερινο πρόγραμμά της, η DEO έχει τη μεγάλη χαρά να λειτουργεί για δεύτερη χρονιά ως φορέας πρακτικής άσκησης, απευθυνόμενη σε φοιτητ@ από ελληνικά δημόσια πανεπιστήμια. Η DEO προσφέρει πέντε θέσεις άσκησης μέσω ΕΣΠΑ για τους μήνες Ιούλιος και Αύγουστο 2026, υποστηρίζοντας άτομα που τρέφουν ενδιαφέρον για τη σύγχρονη τέχνη και τη σύνδεση/συνδιαμόρφωσή της με κοινότητες της περιφέρειας, όπως η νησιωτική κοινωνία της Χίου.  Αν: ✅είσαι φοιτητ@ σε σχολή/τμήμα με αντικείμενο σπουδών συναφές προς το πρόγραμμα DEO 2006 - Καλές Tέχνες, Ανθρωπιστικές και Κοινωνικές Επιστήμες, Αρχιτεκτονική, Φυσικό Περιβάλλον, Τουρισμός, Επικοινωνία ✅αναζητάς φορέα πρακτικής ✅σου φαίνεται καλή ιδέα να περάσεις το καλοκαίρι σου στη Χίο βρες περισσότερες πληροφορίες για τις θέσεις της DEO στον κόμβο πρακτικής άσκησης Άτλας, με τον κωδικό 307463. Σε περιμένουμε! 🏝️ 🌞🌊 ——- While preparing intensively for its sixth summer edition, DEO is delighted to operate for a second year as a host organisation for internships, welcoming students from Greek public universities. Through the ESF programme (ΕΣΠΑ), DEO is offering five internship placements for July and August 2026, supporting individuals with an interest in contemporary art and in its connection to local communities in the context of Chios. If you:  ✅are a student in a school/department whose field of study relates to the DEO 2026 programme - Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Architecture, Natural Environment, Tourism, Communication  ✅are looking for an internship placement
 ✅think it might be a good idea to spend your summer in Chios you can find more information about DEO’s positions on the Atlas Internship Portal, using the code 307463. We look forward to welcoming you! 🏝️ 🌞🌊

On Thursday, our DEO patrons and their friends came together in Athens for the first of many artist tours - celebrating the work of two DEO alumni, with many more to follow. We began at the newly opened commission at the @onassis.stegi hospital, where Nikomachi Karakostanoglou (@nikomachi.k_studio_ ) created a “Room of Strength” - a soft, womb-like space shaped for anyone who needs a moment’s shelter. At its centre, a crystalline heart holds the day’s shifting light; a quiet pulse for doctors, nurses, patients and visitors seeking calm in the midst of difficulty. We then visited Andreas Lolis’ solo exhibition “Accidental Monuments” at @the_breeder_gallery - a constellation of sculptures that turn everyday traces into markers of memory. Shirts, doors, planks, worn shoes: fragments transformed into open-ended stories about labour, loss, tenderness, and the ordinary gestures that quietly endure. These visits are the beginning of a new DEO initiative - private previews and behind-the-scenes moments designed for our patrons, supporting our artists long after their exhibitions with us in Chios. Nikomachi (My Past Is a Foreign Country, 2023) and @lolis.andreas (My Dreams Were Dashed Against Your Walls, 2024) are only the first; many more DEO artists will be celebrated in the months ahead. If you’d like to be part of this growing circle - supporting artists, joining these intimate tours, and helping shape DEO’s future - we’d love to welcome you. Images by Young Patrons’ Chair, Eugenia Vandoros @eugenia_vandoros

Contemporary art is thriving in Paris, especially during Art Basel Paris - and the DEO community came together to celebrate with a cocktail dinatoire generously hosted by our supporter Constantin Pavleas at his offices in Odéon. It was a joy to see so many familiar faces - from DEO artists and patrons to editors and friends - gathered in one place. We were also thrilled to encounter works across the city by DEO artists past and present: Adriana Varejão (2025) and Paulo Nimer Pjota (2021) at Art Basel Paris, Andreas Lolis (2024) at Paris Internationale, Mohammad Alfaraj (2025) at Asia Now, Anestis Michalis at Design Miami (2025), and Serapis Maritime (2022) with their intervention at Dover Street Market Paris. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who joined us and continues to support DEO’s journey around the world.

It’s been an inspiring Frieze Week — and the DEO community has been beautifully present across London! 💫 From major museum openings to thoughtful presentations at the fair, our artists and collaborators continue to shape conversations and share their visions in powerful ways. Highlights included: ✨ Ahmet Doğu İpek’s book launch at Tate Modern (featuring his Vessa participation!) and his solo exhibition opening at Tate St Ives ✨ Teresa Solar’s public sculpture outside the Hayward Gallery ✨ Abbas Zahedi’s exhibition Begin Again at Tate Modern, his installation at Harlesden High Street, and new representation with Proyectos Ultravioleta ✨ At Frieze London, visitors also encountered works by Paulo Nimer Pjota, Maria Loizidou, Andreas Lolis, Georgia Sagri, and Francis Offman We’re proud to see members of the DEO family celebrated this week — and equally proud of all those whose practices unfold quietly, steadily, and with the same depth of vision. This sense of shared purpose and creative kinship is what truly defines our community. 💛

LAST DAYS ONCE WE WERE GARDENS UNTIL SEPTEMBER 7 10:00 – 14:00 & 17:00 – 20:00 Theo Triantafyllidis, BugSim (Pheromone spa), 2022 for Once We Were Gardens, DEO, 2025, Karavas Estate, Chios Island, Greece, Courtesy of the artist and The Breeder Gallery. Photo: Nikos Alexopoulos With the Support of Onassis Culture In BugSim (Pheromone spa), Theo Triantafyllidis constructs a closed digital ecosystem –a live simulation of a terrarium in which insects, plants and soil coexist in a state of delicate interdependence, a digital environment not just programmed, but constantly evolving. Τhe work unfolds within a self-contained, monitored system. Microscopic life is rendered in motion, preserved and observed, yet always on the brink of disorder. Τhe piece highlights our desire to preserve, manage and intervene –whether in nature, institutions or our own bodies. But what happens when systems resist control? When preservation becomes indistinguishable from containment? The organisms within the terrarium adapt, decay, regenerate. Their cycles mirror our own, both physical and emotional. In this closed system, transformation is persistent, slow and often imperceptible. BugSim (Pheromone Spa) explores the quiet violence of the systems that determine what must endure and what may be left to wither. It asks the question: what remains when a structure –organic or institutional– begins to fray? What forms of life emerge in the aftermath of control? Through digital simulation, Triantafyllidis does not provide a way to escape entropy, but an invitation to dwell within it –to observe how things fall apart and what, nonetheless, persists.

ONCE WE WERE GARDENS TILL SEPTEMBER 7 10:00-14:00 & 17:00 – 20:00 Teresa Solar Abboud, Tunnel boring machine, 2024 for Once We Were Gardens, DEO, 2025, Chios Island, Greece. Courtesy of the artist and Travesia Cuatro Gallery. Photo: Nikos Alexopoulos Inside the old stables of the estate, decomposition and neglect surface alongside traces of past abundance. As with nearly every Kampos property, the animals that once aided cultivation, the operation of water systems and the rhythms of agricultural life are now gone. Within this atmosphere of abandonment and transition, Teresa Solar Abboud presents Tunnel Boring Machine (2024). Its fossil-like form, with a surface that seems to pulse with a strange, non-human life, evokes a presence both ancient and speculative. Somewhere between a shell, a plant and a pre-historic creature, the work resists identification. It calls upon us to reconsider transformation on geological rather than human terms –to view life not as a singular trajectory, but as an expansive continuum. Solar Abboud’s practice is rooted in material states of transition: between organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and emergence. These polarities coexist –held in a state of tension as if in flux. In Tunnel boring machine, this tension becomes palpable. Presented in the disused stable, the work reads like a remnant from a possible future –or a relic from an unremembered past. It enables us to envision Kampos not merely as a site of memory, but as a speculative landscape. A place where time folds, life forms are not fixed, and transformation is continuous, strange and uncontainable.

Socratis Socratous, Stolen garden (Revisited), 2009-2025 for the exhibition Once We Were Gardens, 2025, DEO, Karavas Estate, Courtesy of the artist and The Breeder, photos: Nikos Alexopoulos & Ioanna Chatziandreou Returning to Chios after his participation in DEO’s exhibition in Vessa in 2024, Socratis Socratous revisits the garden –a persistent metaphor and formal site in his practice. Stolen Garden (Revisited) unfolds as a dense, sculptural tapestry made of leaves, branches, seed pods and moss –some organic, others cast in metal. Silver, gold, copper and bronze intermingle with living material in an intricate landscape of decay and simulation. In this new presentation, Socratous draws on three of his earlier works –Stolen Goods (2009-2015), Stolen Garden (2014) and Untitled (from the series National Garden, Athens, 2015)– continuing a decades-long exploration of the garden as a space where private and public, beauty and violence, nature and ideology converge. For Socratous, the garden is never neutral –it is a cultivated, often contested space. Whether in his native Cyprus, the National Garden of Athens or Kampos, it becomes a stage for political projection, colonial imposition and cultural memory. Here, cast fragments –pomegranates, olives, laurel leaves, weeds– appear both eternal and fragile, transformed into precious artefacts that refuse to remain purely decorative. Their hybrid forms allude to the layered temporality of the garden: once vibrant, now still; once native, now foreign; once public, now under surveillance. Through this convergence of flora and metal, preservation and decay, the installation meditates on displacement, forced transformation and the uneasy legacies of nationhood. As with much of Socratous’s work, Stolen Garden (Revisited) uses the seduction of surface –gleaming metals, lush density– to cloak a deeper disquiet. What appears ornamental reveals an undercurrent of loss. These gardens are spaces not only of beauty, but also of mourning, where the past is embedded in every seed, every cast shadow.

Mohammad Alfaraj, Catch me before I fall, new commission for the exhibition Once We Were Gardens, 2025, DEO, Karavas Estate, Chios Island, Greece. Courtesy of the artist and DEO, photo: Nikos Alexopoulos Catch me before I fall unfolds around an orange tree: transparent photographs, poems and charcoal sketches hang delicately from its branches, vulnerable to the breeze. Beneath them lies a flower bed of pinwheels, made of printed images and metal, blown away by the wind in the middle of their bloom. The tree listens to the surrounding world and plays it back –its rustle mingled with breath, bird chirping and footsteps. This is a garden of fragile connections, where each element appears to teeter at the edge of descent. When a paper falls, it is not lost –it is a benediction. For Alfaraj, witnessing becomes a form of care and catching what falls is not rescue, but acknowledgment. The work brings together photography, sculpture and drawing into an ecosystem of emotions: guilt, tenderness, fear, love. It evokes the bittersweet burden of memory –the beautiful things we preserve in the gardens of our hearts and the darker growths we may need to uproot. Alfaraj makes no distinction between the poisonous and the precious. Both are part of the soil. In Once We Were Gardens, Alfaraj’s installation feels both timeless and uncannily contemporary. It creates space for the unseen gestures of care, the ones that happen quietly –catching, watching, remembering. A kind of slow devotion. The installation does not pretend to remedy the fall. However, it suggests that when witnessed with tenderness, falling can still have an element of grace.

Yaşam Şaşmazer, Once We Were Series, New commission for the exhibition Once We Were Gardens, 2025, DEO, Karavas Estate, Chios island, Greece, courtesy of the artist, DEO and Zilberman Gallery. photo: Nikos Alexopoulos Supported by SAHA Association Yaşam Şaşmazer presents three new carved wooden busts –a quiet homage to those who once lived, worked on or passed through the Karavas estate. From the Karavas family and former owners, to writers, poets, labourers and caretakers, these figures represent a layered human presence that still lingers in the garden’s architecture, its soil and its silences. The bust series, launched in 2017, draws on personal, collective and imagined histories. Carved from wood –a living, organic material– the sculptures embody the passage of time. Cracks, warping and variations in colour are not flaws, but part of the work’s vocabulary. They speak of erosion, transformation and the fragility of memory. These are not traditional portraits. The faces are partially erased, their features blurred or worn away. This gradual disappearance reflects the way we forget –unevenly and often tenderly. Each bust becomes a vessel for what fades: memory, presence, the trace of lives lived. Covered in patches of fungi and moss, the sculptures return to nature while retaining their form. Their gradual decomposition defies idealisation. No celebration of permanence here –only reverence for what breaks down, reformats and returns to the earth. These figures incarnate impermanence and vulnerability –reminding us of the beauty in what fades, collapses and quietly transforms over time.

✨EXHIBITION MAP – Find the Artwork in the Garden! ✨ Our children’s exhibition map has quickly become the most loved tool of Once We Were Gardens — and for the second year in a row, it’s spreading purely by word of mouth 🌱 Designed by Maria Sotiropoulou, the map transforms a visit into a playful adventure: 🖼️ Spot the works in the garden 🎨 Match the stickers to their place on the map 📖 Create your own handmade souvenir of the exhibition Perfect for children (and secretly for adults too!), the map encourages sensory discovery and turns the exhibition into a game of exploration. 🌿💡 👉 We invite parents and children to come, play, and discover the exhibition together — turning art into a shared experience of joy and imagination. 📍 Available at the DEO Info Point, Karavas Estate entrance 🗓 On view until 7 September ⏰ Wed–Sun | 10:00–14:00 & 17:00–20:00 📸 @shooterio and the DEO team