Architecture is often presented as a utopian project of perfection. Immaculate renders, on-trend statements of style, and the promise of improvement through the new. However, the dialectical idea of ruin is embedded within those utopic ideas of the present and past. The grandest ruins from ancient civilisations and societies now stand not only as tourist and heritage destinations, but as portals to a past through which we may seek to understand and critique our lives, society, and art of today and the future.

Samos, an island to the eastern edge of the Aegean Sea, sitting a kilometre and a half from the Turkish coast, is – like much Greek landscape – littered with ruin. There are grand archaeological sites, such as the Temple of Goddess Hera and the outline of ancient streets in the main town, Pythagoreion, named in 1955 after Samos’ most famous son, Pythagoras. There are also fragments throughout, from columns and cornices sitting in gardens, to arrangements of standing stones islanded within modernity at a beachside car park.




The island is formed of fragments, ruinated pieces of past lives and ideas. These pieces of ruination do not only help us imagine historic architectures and situations, but they serve to remind that fragments are central to our present and future – spatially, culturally, physically, and politically. A new exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion, Fragments and Futures, takes such a starting point to consider how artists take the idea of the fragment – and the gaps which surround fragments – as space for imagination and potential.

Curated by Katerina Gregos, who has been working with the Foundation since 2016, works by 16 artists are well-spaced around rooms of the Art Space’s ground floor, set against not only one another but also window views across the harbour, beach, landscape, and distant Turkish mountains.




Writing in neat publication which sits parallel to the exhibition, Gregos writes that the exhibition “takes its cue from the archaeological heritage of the island of Samos—an especially rich and powerful city-state in ancient times—to pose broader questions about the political dimensions of archaeology, the relationship between material objects and historical knowledge, and the role of archaeology in nation-building and cultural identity.” Samos perhaps is itself a fragment: of Persia, the Delian League of Athens, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and since 1912 part of Greece. A fragment formed of fragments.

Through excavation, archaeologists construct. But fragments are more than repositories of historic fact and carry new layers of meaning once unearthed. Rosella Biscotti’s 5-channel video installation The City (2008), documenting the gradual revealing of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, one of the earliest known human settlements dating back 9,000 years, explores this idea.




Embedding herself within archaeological processes overseen by Ian Hodder, the fifty-minute study follows the flow of work and conversations between the experts involved. The British archaeologist was a proponent of ‘post-processual archaeology’, in which subjectivity is valued over the objectivity of the scientific method, allowing space to acknowledge the ideas, worldview, and biases of the individuals (or state) who unearth the past.

If The City acknowledges bias through documenting process, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achilleos combine on a more playful, speculative work that also interrogates what is privileged and what is hidden in research. The Archive of Grigoris Antoniou (2024), a humorous, cutting film and accompanying series of lantern slides, questions how AI contains in-built biases of colonial thinking and framing, and how through these notions of archiving, cataloguing, and understanding the past should be questioned.




The work proposes a fictional archive of Grigoris Antoniou (c. 1849-1940), a real foreman in colonial-era Cyprus who was central to archaeological understanding but largely removed from narratives and record. In the film, an imagined museum archivist, Martha, is in dialogue with an AI-fuelled Museum Bot that at first helps her process of understanding and cataloguing a series of discovered glass plate photographs, but who quickly becomes a barrier to understanding. In trying to understand if a man discovered on one slide may be the unknown GA, the bot cannot imagine an archaeological expert who does not look like the white, bearded British image of an archaeologist. The bot resists thinking outside of its programmed guardrails, and as such shows how historic biases continue through new systems and tools. “Museum Bot is racist and it still has some bugs,” Martha concludes.

Once in the archive, storeroom, or vitrine, fragments become their own thing, detached from ancient histories and functions. Yiannis Hadjiaslanis’ photographic series, created in museums across Attica from 2016 to 2021, capture new relationships, readings, and contexts objects have absorbed by being museumified. Within new arrangements and displays – intentional and otherwise – objects collect new meanings, and Hadjiaslanis wants us to see such museum fragments not as atomised pieces of their own past, but as a constellation of ongoing interpretation and archaeology.




Art Space Pythagorion is itself housed within a fragment of a ruined past. A 1970’s modernist hotel, constructed during an area of touristic expansion but abandoned in 1998. 14 years later, Chiona Xanthopolou Schwarz rented the building for two years and worked with local architects Penny Petrakou and Stelios Loulourgas on a simple, minimal renovation, to create a contemporary art centre. Deliberately not an attempt at iconic wow a la Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao or Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House, but an altogether gentler repurpose of a found fragment.

The harbour that the Art Space sits on was laid out in the 6th century BC, the first known artificial harbour with a built waterfront, and included a 480 metres long stone pier described by Herodotus as one of the greatest feats of engineering in the Greek world. From this harbour, a 5km long processional path ran west to a large sacred site dedicated to the Goddess Hera. One of the most important ritual routes in the ancient Greek world and once lined with an estimated more than 2,000 statuary and sculptures, the only remaining section is the final section as it arrives at the Heraion.




The route a visitor takes today passes countless fragments across archaeological sites, piled in gardens, erected in car parks and corners, and even reincorporated into later architecture as spolia. Once at the Sanctuary of Hera, a landscape of fragments awaits which offer a connection to deep history. In truth, however, such a site is a connection to deep histories – the landscape and its structures erected and rebuilt over a period of 700 years reflecting a breadth of spiritualities, practices, architectural approaches. As a field of fragments, to the untrained eye at least, history is flattened into sublime ruination.

The column is the sole remainer of 158 that made up the Great Temple. While towering, it is truncated at about only half its original 21 metres height. At 109 metres long, the 9 by 24 column grid formed what Herodotus considered the largest in Greece. But it is hard to read from fragments: not only are the temple’s wooden elements are lost but the site became a quarry during the Byzantine era, with most of the stone history dispersed to become architectural and engineering projects elsewhere.




The fragments here are formed of temples constructed before and after the Grand Temple as well as a wealth of other ritualistic, storage, worship, and decorative projects across the site from different eras. But the shorthand for considering such ruins is not to see a spoliated site of complex palimpsests of diverse histories, meanings, periods, and people, but to imagine a grand moment of the past, one from which we can draw meaning or knowledge to propel our own future.

So, it is no surprise that classical architecture, in all its guises, has long been used inaccurately to invoke ideas of purity, patriarchal strength, power, and perfectitude – lazy tropes increasingly prevalent today in the world of ethno-nationalism, right-wing laziness, and Trump.




Lucia Tallová collages crumple such abuse of history. The Slovakian artist reassembles photographic fragments of antiquity, folding them into imagery of the female body. Feminised, the architecture takes on new power, and where collage is usually presented two-dimensionally, here the bends and buckles of the images reflects the body and reminds that history should not be flattened. The temple at Samos may be the kind of classical grandiosity that serves a patriarchal and fascistic reading of history, but it was, after all, built in honour of the Queen of all Gods, Hera.

The gods were suprahuman, but within myths were afforded human-shaped bodies, making them legible to human minds. These bodies, however, could mutate and were immortal. Panos Profitis’ cast aluminium sculptural series explores such embodied force, creating timeless fragments of bodily moments, deformed, morphed, and adorned.




The metal they are made of speaks to modern industrial processes and aluminium’s morphability as well as the same powers of the body and Gods. In Art Space Pythagorion, the pieces are presented in front of the Aegean Sea, as if plucked from a watery stasis just as many remarkable statues have in the past.

Natalia Manta’s totemic sculpture also speaks to bodies and hybridity. Two metres tall and informed by details of artefacts found on the island, TIME: A Faceless Entity allows a characterful birthing from a flattening of histories into a field of fragments. Just as Samos itself is a fragment of diverse cultures, histories, civilisations, and stories, so too does this work speak to aesthetics, rituals, influences, and design from a range of places from Samos, Europe, Egypt, and the Near East.




Architects from Albert Speer to John Soane (through the drawings of Joseph Gandy) designed their buildings with half an eye on their eventual collapse into sublime romantic memory. In literature it has formed a backbone of theoretical imagining, especially since the 18th century aristocratic right of passage Grand Tours took the wealthy and curious on destination pilgrimages around the remains of ancient European history. They would return home not only able to recount experiences, but also display souvenirs: works of art, books, scientific equipment, and frequently physical fragments of the encountered architecture.

Where once international relations were built upon predation, exploitation, extractivism, and indeed theft, softer and more fruitful approaches now exist. The Schwarz Foundation, founded by Chiona Xanthopolou and her husband Dr. Kurt Schwarz, is based in Munich and rooted in an altogether more collegiate exchange of ideas and culture. Athens-born Chiona has loved the atmosphere of one of Greece’s greenest islands for many decades, so it made sense to turn the initially-temporary cultural use of the modernist hotel into a permanent arts space. That rootedness is also extended through an annual music festival and an architectural scholarship, amongst several educational and cultural initiatives both in Samos and Germany.




As a platform for both sciences and arts, The Schwarz Foundation allows for an exploratory space of looking backwards, forwards, and sideways simultaneously. Petros Moris’ Future Bestiary series does just this in sculptural form. Photogrammetric documentation of ancient artefacts depicting daemonic creatures are transformed into stratified sculptures formed of slabs of Grecian marble digitally cut.

Exploiting modern processes to reimagine historic art and ideas, to expand conversation and pull thinking sideways seems to speak to the Schwarz Foundation’s foundational approach. Between ruin and remaking, past and future, exactitude and imaginary, these speculative statuaries sit upon metallic bases engraved with impenetrable linguistic signs, as if both inviting meaning then pushing back through deliberate obfuscation.




If it considers ideas vertically, through time periods, so too do the foundation and exhibition seek to think laterally. Navine G. Dossos (who we spoke to back in 2022, see 00022) presents a series of watercolours, her Goddess and Vessel paintings, all of Neolithic sculptural pieces featuring gridded, geometric patterns.

Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who over recent years has increasingly popped up as a contemporary art reference, understood such patterns to represent the interconnected nature of life, fertility, and energy. Here, in a gallery surrounded by fishing vessels, the net motif stands for a literal material object, but also the theoretical and metaphorical. The art object, here playfully sketched and coloured, perfectly flits between such worlds.




Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Trilogies works also use drawing to offer a space between. Each frame contains three papers documenting fragments from borehole core samples from subsoils of Beirut and Athens. By drilling down through the layers of time, extracting a cylindrical sample, and then they can be analysed to understand changes to a place over time and what histories exist under the modern city. While the knowledge contains facts, it must undergo interpretation, just as explored in Rosella Biscotti’s film. Here, each paper presents a different interpretation: a photograph, a sketch, and a written description with poetic narrative.

A kind of adaption of Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Three Chairs, in which the artist positioned an actual wooden chair between a 1:1 scale photograph and the dictionary definition of chair, here it reminds that archaeology is a process of diverse outcomes and interpretations. The fragments found through each borehole are physical lumps, but they can be seen differently through different lenses.




On a larger scale, it relates to the wider work of The Schwarz Foundation. Art is one of a variety of tools used to look at the past and future through the present. Archaeology can be treated as a dry, humourless, act of jigsawing fragments of the past to reveal an absolute truth of what came before.

But many of the works here suggest that truth is a malleable and unreliable quality to search for, and that instead space should be allowed through the act of interpretation to consider such unreliability and potential. It is a poetic endeavour, so it is no wonder that culture sits at the centre of The Schwarz Foundation’s endeavours, though this is culture as a tool of refraction and connection, not of definitive answers.