Kammokastra
cotton canvas, charcoal, steel tubes, tube connectors, stainless steel mirror, chain, sand, printed photograph (taken by the artists’ mother)
Approx. 320 x 330 x 340cm
2025
photos from Fluid Persistence exhibition
curated by Dr. Elena Stylianou
NiMAC - Nicosia Municipal Arts Center - Nicosia, Cyprus
If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches... Memory is like sand in my hand... - Agnés Varda
Ioannides's work explores memory as a shifting terrain: fragile, fluid, and endlessly reshaped. At its centre is the square, borrowed from archaeological excavation: a structure that attempts to impose order yet continually tilts, breaks, and reforms. Metal frameworks evoke construction and containment and echo systems of discipline, while the reflective surface of the mirror traverses our ways of seeing the work and ourselves within it, pushing back with sensuality and defiance. Charcoal frottages taken from the tiled floor of the artist's childhood home carry intimate traces of domestic life. Water flows across these structures, refusing containment and evoking a womb-like sense of suspension and trust. Birds, light and unpredictable, introduce a subtle, yet wild counter current. At the same time, the use of charcoal gathered from Cyprus's burned villages in the big fire of the summer of 2025, becomes both medium and memory, filling this “castle of sand” with fragments that invite us to drift, imagine, and rediscover grief and renewal.
text by Dr. Elena Stylianou
The works' title, Kammokastra (Καμμόκαστρα), is a neologism that combines multiple Greek words: καμμώ (in Cypriot Greek, the act of counting with closed eyes before searching in hide-and-seek), καμένο (“burnt”), άμμος (“sand”), and κάστρα (“castles”). Together, these elements evoke action, instability, construction, and destruction. Semantically, the word refers to something that looks solid but is unstable and already ruined beneath the surface - like a sandcastle: built, imagined, and destined to collapse. As a queer practice of linguistic invention and world-making, Kammokastra enacts a layered metaphor of pretence, fragility, and impermanence, where what appears firm is in fact precarious and already shifting away.
Note on the making of the work:
The creation of Kammokastra was a collaborative process with my family. My grandfather, a metalworker, helped construct the steel structure, while my grandmother assisted in sewing the fabric canvas. The photograph featured in the work, depicting me as a child, was taken by my mother. Their contributions were essential to bringing the piece to life.