Maria Loizidou. Newcomers

Maria Loizidou’s exhibition Newcomers transformed the abandoned Minerva Hotel in Platres into a meditation on displacement, refuge, and belonging. The site-specific installation responded to the hotel’s layered history as both summer retreat and wartime shelter, organizing visitors through six thematic spaces using fabric, sound, light, and found objects. The exhibition was accompanied by three parallel events exploring collective discourse, the relationship between desire and ownership, and artistic inhabitation of space. Alexandra Landré’s accompanying essay drew on Arendt and Ahmed to frame Loizidou’s work as “political tenderness”—making visible those erased from history through delicate interventions that hold space for bodies that don’t “fit,” offering traces rather than monuments for the forgotten.

Maria Loizidou’s practice interweaves personal and political references in relation to the history of colonialism, war, oppression, minorities, and the deprivation of social welfare. Her work combines drawings, video, sculpture, waving and installations.