Constantine Stefanou is in his early thirties but has already lived many lives, one could say he is wise beyond his years.

Stefanou is an Adelaide-based multidisciplinary sound artist, musician, arts organiser and emerging scientist.

For a while his main commitment was as a performing and recording musician, touring Australia, Southeast Asia and South Korea.

Stefanou is a graduate in ecology and spatial sciences at the University of Adelaide, is doing his honours at Flinders University. In 2021 he started an initiative called MUD: Improvisation and Extended Domains.

MUD is an arts initiative supporting multi-disciplined communities of artistic practice across conventional and unconventional domains.

It aids cultural and ecological systems through experimental, regenerative, and empowering projects.

But before MUD, Stefanou had to get stuck in the mud.

Bringing back a family practice

Forty-five minutes out of Melbourne’s CBD, Stefanou’s family own a farm, where the family lived.

“Somewhere around 2016 I decided to go into farming and I grew garlic for a couple of years, and was selling that,” he tells Neos Kosmos.

“Then that led me towards studying agriculture and I moved to Adelaide to study ecology.

“As I was growing up, no one was really growing food on that property but in the 60s and 70s they were growing food.”

The farming had stopped when his papou tragically died in the late 1960s’ after a tractor turned over and crushed him.

“This was an awful, horrific event that had a really big effect on the family, and obviously on the way that the farm could operate because now suddenly there’s my yiayia left with three kids.”

“My mum, aunty and uncle, and she had to raise them. She had to pay off debts. She’s like this 5-foot-2 staunch woman who never got education. She just completely took control and carved her way into the world.

“So I think in a way, she inspires me a lot on how we can make anything happen.”

A rewarding practice

From that point on Stefanou felt that he needed to combine his passions, music, farming, art and what he feels is his obligations to the world – environmental sustainability, climate justice, and economic and ecological justice.

He got into the occupy movement in Melbourne in the early 2010s.

His work with MUD and his science studies have come together and now his honours is looking at how we can a build regenerative and sustainable food system, where the growing of food is like an arts practise.

Stefanou says MUD, where he holds events, parties, programs and more to showcase artists is super rewarding.

“Being in Adelaide, in a smaller city, I feel like people are more comfortable with experimentation – the naivety and the innocence of creativity.”

“In larger cities like Melbourne or Sydney, there’s this feeling of having to have something finished and polished.

“One of the things that MUD tries to do is to show to a lot of emerging artists… that they don’t need to go to Melbourne or Sydney or overseas to be able to actually have a really rewarding and experimental arts practise.”

An eye-opening experience in Greece

Last year Stefanou spent eight months in Europe, including four in Greece, based mainly in Athens.

There he was able to reconnect with family, his mum’s dad was Pontian and her mum from Kozani and his dad’s side is a mix of Trikala and Kalabaka.

“We connected with language, with the political difficulties that are over there in Greece, it was really eye opening. It was the first time I’d been back since 2015,” he says.

One of the interesting things he noticed was the lack of community gardens.

“There’s a lot of empty lots in Athens and I was like, ‘why isn’t there more community gardens?'”

“I think if I went back I would sort of try and do some work in that space.”

But he is aware that there are still people doing regenerative agricultural work.

“I think one of the challenges in Greece is because it is so dominated by tourism, every type of investment or funding is often is through the tourism lens.”

“You have a lot of investment coming from outside of Greece into those spaces and I think that it can maybe lead to local peoples voices not actually being heard and like it’s just being a reproduction of northern European values coming into Greece.

So he questions and wonders what would a non-tourist focused Greece looks like?

He asked some family and no one really had any answers to what happens after tourism or if there is an after tourism?

He also brought up climate refugees and the brain drain, the educated people that left Greece because of the financial crisis.

“Most of the response that I got from people is ‘if today is good, that’s great. We’ll see what tomorrow is like’ and that’s it.”

“There’s something endearing and noble about that but there’s also something scary if people don’t feel like they can even imagine or are allowed to imagine a different version of Greece.”