"Iron Horse and a Sickle”, 2025, site specific installation.

The project titled “Iron Horse and a Sickle” attempts a semiotic experiment of visual and verbal associations along the tourist route and at the stations of the Pelion Decauville train.

The primary material used was drawn from various testimonies of local residents related to the Second World War. During the research process for the creation of the project, words and expressions were selected from these testimonies that display similarities to, or share a tone with, phrases found in texts of global war literature — by authors such as Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Heller, W. G. Sebald, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Kerr, and others.
Through this method, a vocabulary–phraseology of war was constructed, detached from any specific time and place, with the aim of functioning as a shared cognitive reference for the viewer on a subconscious level.

The media used for the project’s ephemeral installation are the flag and the postcard.
Within the framework of the project, the flag loses its official, conventional status and is redesigned to signify something new.
The words and phrases can be perceived with an open and poetic interpretive disposition, leading to different associative variations that evoke either personal or historical memories.

Postcards (printed via the risotype method) were created for the project and offered to the train’s travelers as souvenirs of the artistic action. Their compositions incorporate typical elements of historical commemorative depictions from pleasant journeys on the Decauville trains, such as those from the 1889 Paris Exposition. These elements interact with archival photographs depicting the same trains in scenes of profound humiliation endured by humanity during darker historical periods, such as during the German Occupation in Pelion.