TITLE: The Palpitating Root Ep. 1: The Last Map
WHO: Konstantinos Kotsis / Despina Charitonidi
WHEN: 24.11.25
WHERE: Florina
CURATED BY: Christina Petkopoulou

2025 marked the inauguration of ΦΑΝΚΑ Florina Art Residency and its first exhibition series titled The Palpitating Root. For its first episode, Konstantinos Kotsis and Despina Charitonidi conducted field research and presented a performative sculptural intervention titled The Last Map in the neighborhood of the municipal market, central Florina, Greece. Their work, realised in the presence of an audience during a performance on 24.11.25. The installation that remained on site seeks to foreground the processes through which the history and geography of a place are formed and transformed. Focusing on Florina and the wider region of the Central Balkans, the artists approach the vocabulary of building and construction materials as an allegory for the formation of community, language and nationhood. In their shared research, materiality functions as a point of departure for reflection on the relationship between place, collectivity, and historical continuity.


Despina Charitonidi and Konstantinos Kotsis draw on inquiries that reach back to the dawn of human societies. Ceramics, vernacular architecture, and ritual are reconfigured through contemporary terms in an artistic intervention that reads the practice of building as a social practice. In their shared research, materiality functions as a point of departure for reflecting on the relationship between place, collectivity, and historical narrative.

Watch video documentation here



The program is supported by and under the auspices of Ministry of Culture.

Video: Olga Chrysoula, Mira Maroniti
Images: Konstantinos Kotsis
Curator: Christina Petkopoulou
Curatorial Assistant: Marina Gioka
Production: A-DASH


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