Events — Talk
The Fumes of Mars by Katerina Angelopoulou: Presentation and Q&A
Thursday 14 May 2026
‘A large wildfire has a very distinctive sound. No one can tell you unless they have been in one. It is a sound that can haunt you…’
The Fumes of Mars is a book investigating the 2018 Mati wildfire near Athens — one of the deadliest in recorded history. On 23 July 2018 wildfires swept through Mati, Greece, 30 kilometres from Athens. Over 100 lives were lost and victims were left to fight for survival alone. Artist Katerina Angelopoulou survived the fire, fleeing with her three-year-old child.
The book acts as a counter-archive — a forensic and deeply personal investigation into how official narratives of catastrophe are constructed and enforced. It brings together Angelopoulou’s photographs taken during and after the disaster, survivor testimonies, aerial maps marking where each victim died, weather reports, CCTV footage and personal artefacts recovered from the ruins: jewellery, books, glasses. The work challenges the official narrative, one that persists and blames residents and victims.
Its structure is non-linear, mirroring how trauma fractures narrative, fragmentary, refusing easy resolution. Though rooted in a specific catastrophe, the work speaks to something universal: the failure of institutions, the invisibility of survivors, and the struggle for accountability in an era of compounding climate catastrophe.
The artist will be in conversation with publisher Stuart Smith (GOST Books). A Q&A will follow the presentation.
Image: Katerina Angelopoulou
Additional information
Katerina Angelopoulou
Katerina Angelopoulou (b. 1982, Athens) is an artist working primarily with photography to explore the performativity of space and the tension between private memory and public record. Through long-term research into oral histories and archival material, she recovers silenced or misrepresented pasts, weaving them into elliptical, non-linear narratives that interrogate institutional power, collective memory, and the politics of the photographic record.
Grounded in two decades of performance design and dramaturgy across theatre, dance, opera, and film, her image-making is shaped by spatial thinking and choreographic sensibility developed through collaborations with Jukstapoz Dance Company, Es Devlin, and directors Graham Vick, Renato Zanella and Theo Angelopoulos. Her work has appeared in British Journal of Photography, Photoworks, Blind, Phase, HUCK, Source, and Aesthetica, among other publications, and presented at the National Theatre, the Barbican, and the Royal Festival Hall in London and the National Opera of Greece, among other venues.
Awards and recognition include the FORMAT Reviewers’ Choice Award, the Royal Opera House Bursary and Award for Stage Design and shortlistings for the Belfast Photo Festival, the Dummy Award and the COCA Project Award. She holds an MA with Distinction in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication (2021) and trained previously in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London and Scenography at Central Saint Martins.
Angelopoulou is a 2025 FUTURES Photography nominee, selected by VOID Books and mentored by Photo Elysée. Her first monograph, The Fumes of Mars, was published by GOST Books in 2025.
Venue
The Hellenic Centre
Tickets
£5/£4 concession, free for members | Booking required via Humanitix or 020 7487 5060
Times
19:00