Elias Casanovas and Zoe Tzikas

Zoe Tzika and Elias Casanovas are architects whose corresponding works study the relation between people and their environment in different ways. Zoe graduated from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, on the topic of affordable and sustainable housing. She is investigating community participation and alternative models of housing. Elias is a landscape architect, having graduated from ETSAV – Polytechnic University of Barcelona. In his practice he understands landscape as the identity derived
from the dynamics between territory and people. The aim of this conception is to understand how to encompass cultural and ecological practices through landscape design.

In the case of the fe26 residency project at Tinos they propose a double approach to explore the relationship between people and territory. They will follow a research process to document testimonies from the residents of Pirgos, to understand what is, or have been, their connection with the place in emotional, practical or identitary terms. In relation to this investigation, they will propose an in-situ intervention on the quarry. This intervention understands the quarry as the territory in abstract where formal relations are established through the rearrangement of the existing
materials.

https://www.re-dwell.eu/

https://cronicayelias.blogspot.com/

The project, hybrid limits, understands the quarries on the island of Tinos as an abstract metaphor of the human settlements. The transition between the urban and the territory has different elements (paths, vegetable gardens, empty land, dry stone walls, etc.) that articulate the relationship between
people and nature. We want to reflect on that by working on the limits of the quarries as a scenario for interaction. The project identifies the limits of the quarries as wide transitional spaces proposing land art interventions that reorganize the surrounding material (quarries waste, plants, earth, rocks, wood and others). The objective is to establish practical and metaphorical relations between the fields, the paths and the walls that connect with the quarries. Furthermore, we want these interventions to be performative events, a series of workshops, each one related to a part of the limit, collaborating with locals and artisans to reflect on the interventions.

Quarry of Agios Eleutherios – Pyrgos,Tinos. In order to understand its becoming we searched for memories and traces of the past. We met with people that used to work as marble carvers, or that used to help their parents in the quarry, to see through their eyes. The quarry was revealed to us as both a geological and a human-made landscape. In its shapes, internal structures and forms we see the intersection of geological flows with human cuts. This is the contact point of a slow movement of millions of years with the persistent movement of millions of small knocks. The transition from the big to the smaller scale, the human scale. From this dialog between people and marble appeared paths, houses, sculptures, temples and meanings. The people shaped the material and the material shaped them. An old wise voice said: “you give to it and it gives you back”. Somehow, a form of love. And this is what the quarry is and what we can say about it.