Skala² emerges from a situated inquiry into the material and symbolic terrains of Larnaca’s industrial Skala precinct, a locus where maritime labour, petroleum infrastructures, and collective memory intersect and persist in the urban imaginary. Conceived for the 2023 Larnaca Biennale, an expansive platform for contemporary artistic intervention and reflection, Skala² foregrounds the poetics of repurposing, inviting audiences to witness the transformation of industrial artefacts into a contemplative field of encounter.

At its core, Skala² is a site-specific installation and video work that reanimates decommissioned oil tank ladders — remnants of Skala’s erstwhile industrial lifeworld — as sculptural conduits of ascent, memory, and futurity. These ladders, once utilitarian structures of ascent and descent, are re-configured as visual and phenomenological prompts that connect corporeal movement with architectural form, fracturing habitual perceptions of industrial detritus and inviting new ways of seeing and feeling place.

This project is grounded in an expanded field approach, in which the artwork does not merely occupy a site but intervenes in the ongoing relations among body, history, and environment. The recontextualisation of industrial ladders into a poetic scape nods to contemporary dialogues in relational aesthetics and critical regionalism, in which artworks operate as situated performances of local knowledge, heritage, and embodied practice rather than as isolated objects. Skala² enacts this by activating the ladders not as static relics but as vectors of attention, inviting viewers to traverse, reflect, and re-imagine Skala’s industrial past toward a future that honours continuity and transformation.

Accompanying the sculptural installation, the video component (available online) extends this engagement in time and space, weaving imagery, rhythm, and urbanness into a moving meditation on Larnaca’s layered identities and lived histories.

By celebrating the aesthetic and historical particularities of Skala’s industrial infrastructure within the broader context of the Larnaca Biennale’s commitment to place-responsive artmaking, The Skala Project asserts that creative re-use can be a mode of cultural continuity: one that honours what was while envisioning what might be.

Joined project with Ioanis Michalouides