Show me your place
The program "Show Me Your Place" is a research and curatorial initiative by ASTRO collective under the auspices and production of the Anafi International Film Festival. From October 2025 to May 2026, the program invites four artists to work at four different time points throughout the year, using Anafi as both a personal and collective place. The title of the program comes from the folk saying "Show me your place, and I'll tell you who you are," whose origin in Greek tradition signifies the deep connection between the place where someone lives, or comes from, and their identity.
The program employs this phrase as a site-responsive methodology, designed by Raisa Desypri, and aims to invite temporary and permanent residents of the island to reflect on place, memory, and belonging through storytelling and performative exchange. Through workshops, creative exchanges, and collaborations with the local community, the artists will invite locals to "show" them the island, not only as a place of residence or tourist destination, but as a territory of flows, transformations, and multiple identities.
The aim of the program is for the visiting artists and locals to co-design an "identity" for the island of Anafi that is multidimensional but also personal. The initiative will culminate in an interactive collective exhibition, created on the island, for the island, which will serve as a visual archive of the workshops and will act as a record of the network of local relationships, providing an archive available to present and future generations of residents.
A big thank you goes to the Athina I. Martinos Foundation, which supports the implementation of our program through the Bodossaki Foundation's "Support Points" fund.
Participating workshop artists: Vasilia Sofroniu, Kanela Petropoulou, Antigoni Papantoni, Katerina Markoulaki
Curator: Raisa Desypri
Producer: Stelios Christoforou
Talismans of the Earth with Vasilia Sofroniou 18-19th of October 2025, Anafi
The first workshop took place in October on the island and focused on children's experiential relationship with the place, memory, and collective storytelling. Through play and walking exploration, the children walked the land of the island, collected natural materials, and observed the sounds, textures, and color changes of the autumn landscape. Guided by imagination and memory, they shared personal stories, rediscovering their place not as a fixed geographical point, but as a living organism that changes and breathes. They then created amulets, learning about them as symbols of completion and protection. With the help of their mothers and guardians, they returned them to the land of Anafi, moulded by their own hands, and we let them become one again with the soil from whence they came, from the earth, to the earth, completing a cycle of collective creation and contribution to the place.
The action was carried out by visual artist Vasilia Sofroniu, a member of the ASTRO artistic and research collective. Sofroniu lives and works in Berlin as a visual artist, art educator, and social worker at NeNa eV. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and FilmArche EV, specializing in film editing and digital media.
The activity fostered collaboration, experimentation, and creative expression, enabling children to "show their place" through their own perspective.
Light, Memory, and Landscape with Kanella Petropoulou (DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED)
The workshop "Light, Memory, and Landscape" is a walking photography experience without a camera, where art meets science, local industry, and collective memory. Participants, residents of Anafi, are invited to become guides to their own landscape, introducing the instructor to the geography, materiality, and narratives of the island through local materials.
Through walking routes inspired by psychogeographical methods, participants collect natural and cultural elements, observe the light, the earth, and the textures of the landscape, and record how they connect with local production and how it shapes the place. Over two days, participants experiment with photograms and chemigrams (photographs without a camera), creating images with the power of sunlight and local organic materials such as thyme honey, herbs, saffron, soil, and bread, aiming to explore the materiality of the community and the identity of the place.
The workshop is led by artist and photographer Kanella Petropoulou, born in Tripoli and based in Berlin, who is a photographer and visual artist with a background in photography and audiovisual arts. Since 2022, she has been a member of the ASTRO collective. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals in Greece and abroad, and she has collaborated with international artistic platforms and participated in performances at festivals such as Pop-Kultur Berlin, Fuchsbau, Krama Festival, Art Explora and Agorofoviko. Her artistic work explores memory, the body, and the materiality of landscape through experimental photographic practices.
Photography and Collective Creation Workshop With Antigone Papantoni February 2026 (DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED)
Under the guidance of Antigone Papantoni, a workshop is created on the evolving narrative of the connection between place and community. The workshop focuses on the heart of the island itself: its people.
With a focus on the local residents, participants will engage in portraiture, archival research (personal and collective), and the oral transmission of stories and narratives, responding through photography and documentation to the idea of what constitutes a complete archive. Together with the coordinator and through photographic portraits, research in local archives, traditional recipes, and historical images, as well as through the collection and archiving of oral histories, the participants will co-create a project that captures the living heritage of Anafi.
The aim is to explore the relationship between memory and image creation - how photography can serve both as a witness and as a vehicle for preserving personal and collective history. They will come into contact with the archive of anthropologist Margaret Kenna, which included photographs of displaced communities in Anafi. The photographer invites participants to connect with the past and historical memory, while reflecting on the current relationship of the inhabitants with tourism.
The result will be a collective photo book, with images and narratives created during the workshop, reflecting this process and offering a space for different narratives and ways of understanding the history of Anafi to coexist. A copy of this photo book, which will be presented at the exhibition to be held in May.
