There is something quietly radical about choosing mosaic as a language in an age obsessed with speed. Built from fragments, demanding patience, repetition and physical endurance, the medium resists immediacy and instead asks us to inhabit time differently. In a historical moment marked by uncertainty and constant acceleration, Christina Nakou’s practice offers a rare invitation: to contemplate the fragility of the present without surrendering to it, and to recognize that beauty can outlast both disruption and decay.
Her ongoing project The Antikythera Mosaic, presented at Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei (1 May – 31 August, 2026) and inspired by the marble sculptures recovered from the ancient Antikythera shipwreck and slowly transformed through their encounter with the sea, embraces erosion not as loss but as part of an artwork’s life. Installed over time in different Mediterranean coastal sites, the mosaic becomes a living record of change, where permanence and impermanence exist side by side.
In this conversation, Nakou reflects on her natural path toward art, the deeply intuitive reasons that led her to embrace mosaic as her primary medium, and why working with broken matter has become a way of thinking about the human condition. At a time when our relationship with time itself feels increasingly precarious, her work reminds us that vulnerability and endurance are not opposites, but inseparable forces—and that beauty may derive its greatest strength precisely from its capacity to transform.
Can you tell us about your first encounter with art and what led you specifically to work with mosaic as one of your primary mediums?
I decided that I wanted to become an artist in my adolescence. Perhaps drawing and painting offered me a means to process my thoughts, experiences and emotions in a silent, non-verbal but still liberating way.
I began to work with mosaics while studying Painting in the School of Fine Arts in Athens. I was moved by the materiality of its technique, the experience of time that seems to spread through the repeated breakage of the tesserae and the feeling that the whole body participates in the creation of a work. I was also fascinated by the empirical knowledge that has been accumulated by mosaicists over the centuries, in the different techniques of its application.
I have drawn great inspiration for my work, through the many trips I have done around the Mediterranean to study ancient mosaics in situ up close. It is something so moving to observe the works of ancient mosaicists, while you can realize how relative time can be.
The creation of a mosaic requires our intellect to solve problems related to practical terms but also, it requires an involvement that is connected to our memory, recollection or other subconscious interventions that can be expressed through the hands, for example. I believe that there is a deeper connection bringing all these fragments together, and actually this is the beauty of mosaics, from the start.
Mosaic is an ancient technique, but in your work it feels remarkably contemporary. How do you reinterpret it?
For the last ten years I have been researching the ways in which the mosaic technique – a technique famed for its stability and rigidity – can be used in order to feature conditions of fluidity, that is a condition of constant change and transformation. In this procedure, I investigated mosaics as a means to express water transparency or light diffusion through the opus vermiculatum technique (as in the Daylight Sea Mosaic), to capture transformation through light reflection on bronze tesserae (as in the Following the Route of Water Exhibition), to feature presence and disappearance through the mirroring effect on water (as in the Nocturnal Sea Mosaic or Riflessioni) or to observe the transformation of the mosaic’s material elements as such, as in the performance of the Ice Mosaic.
In this long-lasting attempt, I started perceiving mosaics beyond their durable material corporeality, as handmade mappings of time. Bearing the rapture of the tesserae and recovering it with a new meaning, mosaics note rhythmically the transformative effect of time and so besides their iconography, they can be perceived as time narratives. Also, while mosaics are made to endure and to promise timelessness, they carry the signs of the passage of time and so they feature wear and constant transformation, inviolable conditions of every natural element and being.
Nowadays, as we experience the advance of Artificial Technology, we are exposed to intense and rapidly changing visual information, with no sufficient time to process it. Our physical senses are withdrawn and so do many other qualities associated to our bodies. Are we still experiencing ourselves as parts of the wider natural environment? It seems quite obvious that losing this connection, is affecting dramatically the ongoing deterioration of our Natural Environment.
On your website, you write: “Art helps me not to abandon beauty.” What does this sentence mean to you today, and how does the pursuit of beauty coexist with the complexities and uncertainties of contemporary life?
I believe that beauty is an almost fleeting moment, perceived or felt when someone or something inspires us to remain alive. Beauty is not an image but an experience. It is a condition of inspiration and it has a deeper meaning. It can be found in the way that someone behaves or smiles, in an action, in words or in silence. It is a condition of encounter and of bringing together. I believe that we can get reflected in beauty and get transformed. To recognize the beauty that surrounds us is a kind of respect towards life. It is also a capacity deeply rooted in being human.
Contemporary life is indeed very complex. It demands a high-speed pace where most senses are withdrawn, where we are losing connection with ourselves and with other people. Beauty could be a moment of pause. A moment to realize where we stand. And why.
As a Greek artist, you live in constant dialogue with layers of history, mythology and archaeological remains. How does the past influence the way you think about material, memory and artistic creation?
Growing up in Greece, in a family where reading was both a pleasure and an interest, gave me the opportunity to study archeology and philosophy as something simple and obvious. Archeological remains are found everywhere around in Greece, so we are always referring to other people living in the same places for centuries. There is a familiarization with time. A deep understanding that time is relative and that we are not here to live forever.
One of the books that has inspired me greatly, since I was very young is Kostas Axelos’ book on the Philosophy of Herakleitos. The concept of fluidity and the concept of time as a game in which we all find ourselves trapped. The Sea from the other side, aspires an idea of feminine permanence (the Sea is feminine in Greek).
So, I would say that the most important influences for me, being Greek, are: a wondering on the concept of time (including: life, deterioration, loss and memory), the experience of the sea, and beauty as the recognition of a world being positive and creative. This last, could be also linked to Afrodite, the Greek goddess of Eros, the greater inspiration, who was born on the foam of the sea waves.
I feel that the materiality of mosaics permits my dialogue with all the above mentioned, to come into presence.
Ruins often embody both loss and resilience. Do you see your mosaics as a way of preserving fragments of history, or rather as a means of creating new narratives from what survives?
The art of mosaic is a centuries-old legacy, a narrative that surges from our deep past and spreads towards the future, embodying the signs of use and wear brought about by time.
The creation of handmade mosaics is based on the breakage of matter, which is linked to the endurance of the human body and the meditative “slowness” of our heartbeat. For me, this oxymoronic condition that constitutes a mosaic, namely the acceptance of wear and transformation and the expectation of eternal durability, condenses all the anguish and beauty of the human world.
By using this ancient art, I am interested in highlighting the charming and moving metamorphosis of physical materiality, inviting us to a deepening of physical sensibility.
Each mosaic is unique because it incorporates a patient time-flow that accepts, includes and highlights its deliberate idiosyncrasies and attractive imperfections.
Over the past years, I have been interested not so much in creating mosaics as works of Visual Art but mostly as installations inviting people to engage with their physicality.
I have been collaborating with visually impaired people and with Stefania Vannini, Accessibility Manager in Galleria Borghese to create art programs that would ask the public to engage with the artwork through the tactile sense.
I believe that the sense of touch is a special, intimate and tender way of approaching the physical reality that -still- surrounds us. The haptic sense helps us to become aware of our existential loneliness but also of our necessary connection with others. It is very interesting to note, that the sense of self is essentially shaped from the beginning of life, through tactile experiences. Our ability to perceive ourselves by touching is cultivated as early as the 7th week of pregnancy. It is through touch that the fetus begins to feel its body, its fingers, the inner cavity of its mouth, and thus practices in order to be able to breastfeed immediately after birth. Without the sense of touch, the survival of a newborn human being is uncertain.
Touch is therefore actively linked to the development of our “empathy” but also to the formation of our cognitive ability and memory.
Natural matter, on the contrary, continues to exist throughout the eternity of time, expressing its age and history through the traces of its wear. Our ability too, to perceive the continuum of time, to be historical beings with existential anxieties, is organically linked to the fact of the decay of our physicality, that is, on our mortal and limited lifespan.
How did the idea for The Antikythera Mosaic first emerge? Was there a specific encounter, image or archaeological discovery that sparked the project?
The project is inspired by the Antikythera Shipwreck (1st century BC) which came to light in 1900, when sponge divers came upon it at a depth of 50m. Among the finds were marble statues, partially worn by the sea.
The peculiarity of these statues lies on the fact that their parts buried in the seabed sand remain still perfectly preserved, while their parts exposed to seawater have been significantly eroded.
When I first saw these beautiful statues, I had the idea of creating a mosaic that would illustrate the expansion of a sea wave along the shore, and then I would install it next to the sea so as to get eroded like the marble statues.
The project is of course poetic. The mosaic will be installed in parts at four locations adjacent to the sea so that its interaction with sea water, weather conditions and visitors, will be audio visually recorded and later edited into a film. The anticipated erosion of the mosaic will form the central focus of this documentation.
The Antikythera Mosaic is proposed as a mirroring of the sea. The “deterioration” of the sea itself caused by pollution, climate change, overfishing and other factors raises questions about the irreversible destruction of our natural environment and the urgent issue of water resources’ sustainability. As water has diachronically symbolized the flow of time – encompassing rebirth – it would be interesting to see The Antikythera Mosaic as an archaeological find of a future archaeological research, when, potentially, drinking water and the sea, will be considered “unknown” fields.
The work is conceived as an artwork in progress, intentionally exposed to natural forces and gradual deterioration. What interested you in relinquishing control over the final appearance of the mosaic and allowing time itself to become a collaborator?
I believe that the beauty of art and life is found in their process. Time IS our collaborator in this direction, otherwise we would be experiencing static conditions, where everything would be predictable and nothing would change.
Death from the other side, as the inevitable ending can create an enormous fear to us or it can be seen as a light house spreading light in life’s full timeline.
We don’t have any control in life. We try to control it but she is always escaping.
Rather than controlling her, I am interested in observing life, experiencing her and sharing her with other people.
The project is inspired by the marble statues recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck, whose surfaces were transformed by centuries underwater. How do you interpret deterioration: as a form of loss, a process of transformation, or perhaps a new layer of creation?
I find it very moving that these statues have been transformed by centuries under water, because this kind of transformation seems to be gentle and slow. Some of them have been turned into marble sponges. How do we relate today to the experience of wear and deterioration? To what extent is fragility connected to the meaning of life? What are the qualities that ultimately characterize an experience as “human”? These are some of the questions that concern me.
Loss and deterioration can be unbearable. But Art is our skill, trying to deal with them in a softer way.
Loss and deterioration are also linked to memory, so an eroded marble statue or a worn mosaic actually invite us to imagine how they would look like when created, what was their voyage, how did they change, how much time has passed… They invite us to engage with them. To recreate time through our knowledge, own experiences, our own memories, feelings and thoughts.
Being open to a poetic dialogue also helps us to understand other people, using not only explicit but also implicit ways. It can help us share dialogues in a more respectful way.
Loss, wear and deterioration are linked to life and to creation. I don’t see why attempting to separate them.
I always ask visitors to touch my mosaics. I don’t believe they will get ruined by other people’s caresses.
Themes of time, erosion and material change are central to The Antikythera Mosaic. Are these concerns unique to this project, or have they been present throughout your artistic practice in other forms and works?
Transformation has always been an inspiration to me. The Ice Mosaic for example, consists of a performance where visitors are asked to hold in their hands a mosaic made by bronze tesserae and ice. The mosaic melts during the performance but through its melting the public has the opportunity to admire the amazing beauty of the ice world. At the end water escapes our hands, and only the bronze tesserae are left in our palms. The project highlights the critical issue of climate change but it does so by inviting people to admire the fleeting beauty of our world.
LINK
- Christina Nakou: the fragility of matter as a metaphor for the human condition - July 3, 2026
- The Island: Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan - December 19, 2025
- “RUINS”. Contemporary art echoes the historical memory of a former convent - October 24, 2025
