Edition 2023

New exhibition, new place in Hydra!

The 6th edition of the HYam project will be held this summer at the Historical Archives-Museum of Hydra. A first!

For the third year in a row, the HYam association puts women in the spotlight and invites two young artists, French and Greek, to exhibit during the month of August in a place that reveals the history of Hydra since antiquity to the present day.

Since 2021, HYam (Hydra for Artists of the Mediterranean) has modulated its project in favour of emerging scenes in order to support not only one, but several artists at each edition, and to put the spotlight more particularly on women artists in an international market where they are still under-represented. This year, HYam continues its commitment to the same scheme by taking over a new emblematic location in Hydra.

After occupying, for two summers, the Tombazis House (annex of the Athens School of Fine Arts), the association invites two artists to present their recent works in the Historical Archives-Museum of Hydra. This imposing building is, together with the Yellow House (Lazaros Koundouriotis House), one of the favourite institutions of Hydriots and visitors curious about the past of a people who distinguished themselves during the famous war of independence.

The exhibition - Far on Earth

Like scientists, artists reshuffle the deck. Eva Medin and Stefania Strouza, each in their own way, break down a myth that has been rooted for thousands of years in the collective imagination: that of primitive identity. Since 1980, the American philosopher Donna Haraway has been refuting the belief in this myth of origins, in this original purity which, according to her, has never existed. We would only be the product of a symbiosis and co-evolution. Already in the Paleolithic era, humans cultivated this famous instinct of augmentation in a sophisticated way: they had understood that in order to communicate better in the darkness of the caves, the cave itself was the ideal sounding board! Man has always been a hybrid being systematically coupled, technology, with biological and cultural elements... This is today an almost joyful reality.

In Le Monde Après La Pluie, Eva Medin films a hybrid creature, between man and sculpture, and thus revisits the imaginary worlds of mutation and metamorphosis. In her works, the artist highlights the anticipatory nature of the great narratives of science fiction and is inspired by this evocative power anchored in popular culture, mixing man and fly, robot and policeman, flesh and technology, earth and sacred.
Stefania Strouza's sculptures evoke turbulence, planetary transformations, natural disruptions: thanks to the mental compositions that the artist builds with other entities in mutation, such as Medea, the magician, an anti-heroine with a singular destiny who crosses her myth to be reborn, the artist approaches worlds that are more than human and builds bridges between different types of hybridisation.