Cartography for Future Archaeology, Greece

Cartography for Future Archaeology is a participatory public art project that reimagines marine plastic waste as a form of future archaeological evidence. Situated on the island of Tinos, Greece, the project invites local residents to become active co-creators of material storytelling. Through beach clean-ups, workshops, and data-driven art-making, participants will collect marine debris and embed it into terrazzo tiles. These individual tiles will collectively form a large, modular mosaic floor, illustrating a speculative map of the Mediterranean shaped by ocean currents, ship traffic, constellation routes, and the residue of human consumption.

The project is grounded in Hypercomf’s ongoing work with Benthic Terrazzo, a series of functional surface tiles produced by replacing large part of the materials conventionally used in the terrazzo floor technique with plastic nets, objects, microplastics, ropes, and shell fragments gathered along Greek coasts through beach and coastal clean-ups. Inspired by sedimentation and marine ecology, this methodology serves as an artistic lens, specifically as a way to visualize the “unseen” underwater benthic landscape and how the plastic pollution we are producing not sinks and fossilizes in the ocean floor, becoming part of an unintended geologic record and negatively affecting these ecosystems for years to come. The new phase of this project expands that approach into a participatory process rooted in collaboration, education, and collective action.

The project will invite island residents to open public workshops starting with a number of organized beach clean-ups on multiple coastal locations of the especially litter-burdened North island coast. The collected waste will be cleaned, sorted and archived. Working with an invited marine scientist, participants will learn about local and distant waste systems, how rivers and ocean currents redistribute pollution, and how these processes affect marine biodiversity and the sea’s benthic layers. They will also explore the movement of ship traffic, the paths of plastic particles, and the constellation maps once used by sailors for orientation at sea. Participants will be guided in translating both scientific data and symbolic references into unique terrazzo tile designs. Then these designs will be given materiality using the production technique that the artists will share using the collected marine waste. Each tile will be a hybrid object part of a whole—a blend of memory, evidence, and speculation.

Each participant’s tile will represent their interpretation of ecological data and personal insight, while collectively forming a large-scale, walkable mosaic that speaks to the shared environmental reality of the Mediterranean. By reclaiming this material, the community turns passive damage into active reflection and civic engagement, giving voice to local concerns around pollution. The processed collected waste becomes both a visual archive and a collective gesture of artistic protest. The produced installation will be exhibited on Tinos island in early summer 2026, and following efforts will be made for the installation to travel to other islands. Hoping to inspire both conversation and action towards finding new ways to navigate ecologic uncertainty .

GOALS

The goals of the project are multidimensional: to raise awareness about the invisible presence of plastic in our ecosystems; to provide a creative and scientific understanding of how waste flows through the Mediterranean; to give voice to local concerns around pollution and infrastructure; and to produce a durable, participatory public artwork that can function as a site for environmental education.