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On a Remote Corner of Chios, the Art World Finds Room Think

What the island's relative seclusion offers, according to curator Evita Kyriazi, is a different rhythm: fewer competing demands, fewer openings to rush between and fewer expectations to perform.

The Greek island of Chios is not, in itself, an easy place to get to. From Athens, the options are a propeller plane (not for the nervous flyers among us) or a ferry; to get to this year’s edition of DEO Projects there, a further journey is required, far north of the island’s famous mastic villages, to the quieter northwestern part of the island. This is Amani, a region shaped by generations of emigration to the United States, Germany and Australia, still processing the catastrophic wildfires of August 2025, and now, this summer, home to an international group exhibition that would turn heads in any capital city.

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Chios is not glamorous; it resembles the Greece of my childhood summers far more than the parties and beach clubs of Mykonos or the postcard blue domes and whitewashed hillsides of Santorini: paper tablecloths in tavernas, the sound of cicadas, small streets giving way to squares that come alive with food and dancing come the panigiri (traditional Greek village festival). The island is famous for its mastic, the resin harvested from lentisk trees in the south and used in everything from liqueur to chewing gum, and for a history layered with Byzantine, Genoese and Ottoman traces, shaped by migration and trade and its position in the northeastern Aegean, just a few miles from Turkey. It resists, as Akis Kokkinos, the founder and curator of DEO, puts it, “the stereotypical image of the Greek island.”

DEO, now in its sixth year as the island’s sole contemporary art organization, has made a practice of occupying unexpected locations across Chios each summer, moving between very different landscapes and communities rather than settling in one place or one kind of venue. This year’s choice carries particular weight: the School of Volissos narrowly escaped the major wildfire last August. It is also the last public school still operating across the entire Municipal Unit of Amani, a building “entrusted with future generations while itself living under the threat of decline,” as Kokkinos describes it. The exhibition’s title, “Letter to an Ailing Father,” takes the school’s predicament as both setting and metaphor: the ailing father is not only a biological figure but any structure that has promised protection and failed to provide it, a political system, a state, a patriarchal institution, a form of governance that relinquishes its responsibilities of care. “We’re living through a moment shaped by wars, environmental collapse and profound uncertainty,” Kokkinos told Observer. “There are many fathers who appear unable, or unwilling, to care for the futures they helped create.”

"Letter to an Ailing Father" Artists: Various Venue: The Volissos School Address: Chios 821 03, Greece Through: August 30, 2026

That this conversation is happening here, in a stone school building that survived a wildfire, rather than in a Basel fair booth or a white-walled gallery, is itself a curatorial statement about where serious thinking belongs. Around a hundred people pass through the school each day........

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