Militarized Landscapes

In this Artist Talk, Cypriot artist Stelios Kallinikou and British writer Tom Seymour Evans discuss the (in)visibility of military presence, taking the example of Akrotiri in southern Cyprus—a British military base that is also an ecologically significant wetland.

For several years Kallinikou has been exploring a landscape in his photographs and films, where nature, military infrastructure, and geopolitical interests intersect. Evans, too, focuses on sites of military power. For his book This Is Not An Exercise (The Bodley Head, 2027), he spent several years visiting test sites, training grounds, and military bases. 

Together, Kallinikou and Evans discuss landscape as a site of geopolitical negotiations and how photography and writing can engage with places that are under surveillance, difficult to access, or hidden.

Stelios Kallinikou (b. 1985, Cyprus) works with photography, video, and sound. His practice explores how political and ideological forces shape ideas of territory, landscape, and the body, engaging with themes of colonialism, ecology, technology, spirituality, and the power of images. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including de Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; the Ural Industrial Biennial; Foam, Amsterdam; NiMAC, Nicosia; and the Benaki Museum, Athens. From 2018 to 2019, he was a resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and received the Foam Talent Award in 2019. He is also a co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Project Space in Nicosia.

Tom Seymour Evans is a writer based between London and Berlin. In an attempt to understand how current military preparations are reshaping the world, he has spent several years visiting sites of military testing, training, and basing. His experiences are the subject of his first book, This Is Not An Exercise, which will be published in 2027 by The Bodley Head. He writes about contemporary fiction and other subjects for the Times Literary Supplement.