Every Greek Island is as enchanting as the next. Crete is no exception. It’s layers of history, from the Minoan civilization to the long occupation by the Venetians, along with the combination of fierce mountains with verdant canyons and emerald beach coves lined with otherworldly caves, renders this island almost beyond the reach of description. Even the journey to an island opens a different sensory world. Leaving Piraeus on a ferry is the beginning of an unshackling from tedium and arriving on an island is like rebirth.
Arriving, after a long journey by car, at let’s say your mother’s fishing village in the south of Peloponnesus, is also a relief, but it is not like stepping onto a quay. On an island, that floating feeling persists. It envelops you the moment you notice the mesmerizing light that rebounds from the water and surrounds the land.
On June 14, 2025 Danae Stratou was awarded the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize. As part of the award a new work was commissioned as a site-specific work in Aghios Nikolaos Crete. Stratou created a work called Virtuous Spiral. It comprises of 113 amphorae that spiral in a formation that resembles the symbols on the famous clay Phaistos Disc. This Minoan clay disc, which is in the nearby Heraklion Museum, has been dated back to the 17th century BCE. The symbols are considered to be part of a syllabic script, but archaeologist are yet to crack the code. Stratou placed her amphorae in a clearing that was slightly elevated. It is between the garden of an exclusive hotel and at the edge of cliff that faces the seas. The hotel has informed guides that direct not just the guests, but school groups and any member of the public.
The amphorae have been made from local clay and a dark glaze lines the inner surface. A third of the amphorae are partially buried in the red soil. There is a light inside each amphora, and they are all filled with water. Depending on the light and wind, the surface of the water can be tremulous like the skin of a drum or as alluring as a dark cave. The black glaze reflects the light from the Mediterranean sky. These shimmering surfaces produce a series of mini ponds. If you squat and look across the amphorae you will notice that they add up to a new horizon. One with the color oscillating between the reflection of the blue sky and projection of a black abyss – a kind of Indian blue ink. Walking between the amphorae or even skimming your palm over the surface of water and clay is an atavistic experience. It has the mystery of an impenetrable other worldly myth and the reassurance of a life affirming vessel.
Danae’s mother is an accomplished modernist sculptor who was obsessed with the feminine form, and her father was a successful entrepreneur. She learned about art first from her mother, but her aesthetic sensibility is more in debt to her father. He taught her to read the wind and feel the currents, to mulch the earth and prune the trees. Her mother worked in a studio, but Danae, wanted to be an artist that was, as she says, ‘out in the world’.
Danae is a land artist. Her work is deeply engaged with the politics of environmental sustainability and the rights of people to move. The attunement she has with the land and presence of others is subtle. It comes from a quiet attention in which she zooms in to tiny details, and a swift gesture as she zooms out to resee things from a wider sphere. Her work is deceptively simple. The layers of meaning dispersed into the ambience. For instance, in her installation, Burning Issues – Merimbula (2022) the meaning of the work can be both as subtle as the use of a bellbird chirping amidst a forest, and as forceful as the thrusting sounds of the devastating 2020 fires in Australia. Together, these images and sounds issue a global warning: either nature and culture form a continuous plume of energy or else they will both perish.
In her first collaboration with her husband Yani Varoufakis, The Globalizing Wall, (2012) they travelled the world recording and reflecting on the walls that have been constructed to block migration. During the global financial crisis, Danae and Yani were in constant dialogue about how the story should be told. She pushed him to abandon his forays as a purist in economic game theorist and encouraged his gift for speaking to the widest possible public with intellectual clarity and moral purpose. In 2012 she noted the sense of anguish and paralysis that was engulfing people as they rebounded from one crisis after another. She responded by developing a project called It is Time to Open the Black Boxes (2012). It was an invitation for people to confront the fears that were looming over them. The political and artistic exchange that occurs in Yani and Danae’s relationship has a mercurial quality. It has a robust frame through which their thoughts and actions flow directly in and out of each other, and series of release valves.
In 2017 I saw the installation of Upon the Earth Under the Clouds by Danae Stratou in the Old Mill of Eleusis. The title comes from the response by a mystic vagabond to the question: ‘where do you live?’ He spends his days searching for pieces of ancient marble and then deposits them at night at the door of the museum. The context in Eleusis was stifling. One thousand amphorae were set amongst the crumbling walls and rusting girders of a former industrial mill. When I was there the sky was brilliant blue, and the port was crystal calm. A generation ago, the workers were dying prematurely from the pollution in the air and sea. The amphorae that were used in Eleusis are the same as the ones in Aghios Nikolaos. In both cases the amphorae have been slightly buried into the ground and people are encouraged to weave their way through them and form their own narrative. However, the experience of the same material in two different locations could not be more different. There is a quiet dignity in both places. Yet, in Eleusis the oppressive legacy of the mill is amplified by the stillness in the amphorae.
Yani has just completed his latest book: Raise Your Soul. It is a portrait of five important women in his life. It is also a memoir of the twentieth century political history of Greece. It is both a tribute to women but also a gift to a generation who have not had the chance to listen to their ancestor’s stories. The fifth chapter is devoted to Danae Stratou. It begins with a story about an art project in Mali. He recalls that she needed to sail to a destination on the Niger River. The local fisherman pointed out that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. Danae responded:
“What if you change the shape and angle of your sails and that way you can tack into the wind?”
They had never considered this hypothetical and after she showed them, they were all on their way.
The amphorae in Virtuous Spiral repeat an ancient shape and scale. They were used in antiquity to transport and store olive oil. I have one at the end of my bed in Aegina. As Yani Varoufakis reminds me, ‘in the ancient myths this clay is the same stuff that the Gods used to make us, and the turning of the pot on the wheel is a metaphor of the seasons and the spinning of the world on its axis’. Clay is also the most common material for all banal and sacred artefacts that have survived since antiquity. These vessels, and this material, has been so close to our bodies that we have a feeling of connection that is somewhere between the comfort of domesticated pets, and the utility of a prosthetic. They are ubiquitous and almost an invisible part of the Mediterranean landscape.
The 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal noted that there are two infinities, one that goes one, and the other that goes out. For Danae the virtue of the spiral is that it is infinite and a generative process of renewal, not a journey of exhaustion. Amidst the despair and anguish of our times, there is hope in this image: the more you give the more you get.
*Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis, is a cultural historian and author of many books; his recent one is ‘John Berger and Me’.
