To River

For the seventh edition of Una Boccata d’Arte, Vasilis Papageorgiou brings TO RIVER to the banks of the Tramazzo stream in Tredozio, creating a site-specific intervention that reconnects the local community with the river and its surrounding landscape.

At the heart of the project is a traditional Romagna tablecloth, once belonging to a woman from Faenza, which travelled across Europe to reach the artist’s studio in Athens before returning to Tredozio. Coated in copper, the fabric acquires a new metallic skin, while grasses and flowers seem to emerge from its surface, as if the tablecloth were not covering the meadow but revealing its hidden vitality. Alongside the sculpture, two flags printed with rust carry the patterns of the tablecloth into the village landscape.

The project draws on the words of Robert Macfarlane, who reflects on the absence of the verb “to river” in the English language. Starting from this linguistic observation, Papageorgiou approaches the river as an active process rather than a static geographical feature: a force that flows, transforms, and shapes the relationships between people and their environment.

By transforming an everyday domestic object, marked by wine stains and the traces of shared meals, the artist shifts the tablecloth from its intimate context into a collective dimension. Its journey, the hands that have accompanied it, and the changing surface of the copper become traces of time, exchange, and the bonds that connect people and places. Rust, fabric, and metal bring together natural processes and human intervention, revealing the fragility of the landscape and the ongoing transformations it undergoes.

With TO RIVER, Vasilis Papageorgiou invites the community of Tredozio to reconsider its relationship with the Tramazzo stream, activating its banks as a space of encounter and reflection. Like the water itself, the work remains in motion, tracing a network of memories and affections through which landscape, material, and collective identity continually reshape one another.

ARTIST: Vasilis Papageorgiou