Book Promotion │ The Fumes of Mars by Katerina Angelopoulou at History Museum of BiH
5 June • 14:00 – 15:30
‘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…’
On 23 July 2018, one of the deadliest wildfires ever recorded swept through Mati, Greece, 30 kilometres from Athens. Over a hundred lives were lost and survivors were left to fight for truth alone. Artist Katerina Angelopoulou survived the fire, fleeing with her three-year-old child.
The Fumes of Mars is 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 — that blamed 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.
About the Author: Katerina Angelopoulou
Katerina Angelopoulou is an artist whose lens-based practice examines the performativity of space and place, and the tensions between private and public narratives. Working through long-term research, she engages with oral histories and archives of silenced or misrepresented pasts, forming elliptical, non-linear collective narratives that form the core of her practice.
Her artistic trajectory, rooted in a decades-long practice in scenography for theatre, dance, opera, and film, has gradually expanded to include dramaturgy and, more actively, photography. She was a finalist for the Linbury Prize for Stage Design, received a Royal Opera House bursary and award, and won The FORMAT Reviewers’ Choice Award. Her work has appeared in the British Journal of Photography, Photoworks, Blind, Phase, Aesthetica magazines and the COCA Project among others, and has been shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival and Dummy Award. She has collaborated and designed for Jukstapoz Dance company, Es Devlin, directors Graham Vick, Renatto Zanella, and Theo Angelopoulos, presented and exhibited her work at the National Theatre, Barbican, and Royal Festival Hall in London, the National Opera of Greece, and others internationally.
Originally trained in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences, she later studied Scenography at Central Saint Martins and completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (Distinction, 2021) at London College of Communication.
Katerina is a FUTURES Photography nominee by VOID Books for 2025 and is mentored by Photo Elysée.
Her first monograph The Fumes of Mars was published by GOST in September 2025.