Floating Lands

‘Floating Lands’ imagines an evacuation from the volcanic island of Nisyros using pumice stones from the nearby quarry island of Yali as floating islands. The speculative scenario unfolds during a moment of crisis, the brink of an eruption, when local workers turn to the floating rocks they once extracted to help them escape across the sea. Projected above a pond, the video follows the intimate journey of people and stones as they enter a symbiotic relationship forged through myth, migration and material memory.

Drawing on geological, geopolitical, economic, and historical research, the installation navigates multiple timescales — from deep geological time to late industrialisation. Through this layered fiction, it invites reflection on the interdependence between human and mineral, asking: who builds land, who moves across it, and what new ecologies of care and resilience might emerge when safety is found not in solidity, but in drift.