ATHENS SURREAL
/ URBAN LANDING
/ URBAN LANDING
Athens Surreal has been transforming Athenian landmarks, cityscapes, and infrastructures into dreamlike visions—speculative images where the familiar becomes strange, playful, and alive. Both humorous and uncanny, these re-imaginations reveal Athens not as a static repository of history or a mere expanse of concrete, but as a stage for new forms of encounter.
The exhibition Athens Surreal / URBAN LANDING, extends that vision into a broader reflection on public space. Architecture is not only the art of constructing forms but of articulating experiences—of producing spaces that become meaningful only when used, inhabited, or transformed through everyday practices. As Jean Baudrillard suggested, a city without its scenes of use and performance, risks becoming nothing more than an agglomeration of structures.1 It is the scenic, the theatrical, the lived dimension that renders space legible as urban life.
Here, the city is reactivated through acts of imagination: streets that become playgrounds, monuments that double as habitats, infrastructures that host not only human movement but animal presence and interspecies cohabitation. At the same time, these works engage with urgent environmental realities: rising heat and climate pressures shape the lived experience of Athens, revealing how public spaces must adapt and respond to conditions of environmental stress. By restoring play to the urban realm while acknowledging these challenges, the works reclaim a civic quality that contemporary cities have too often neglected.
In the midst of technological upheaval, tools like generative AI help artists and architects reshape both how we imagine and produce the city, enabling new forms of spatial creativity and perception. In the work of Athens Surreal, AI functions not merely as a technical tool but as a collaborator in the production of space. Its generative distortions allow Athens to be re-seen, stretching architectures into hyperreal scenographies of wonder. These images ask: what happens when technology dreams with us, rather than for us?
What emerges is a vision of Athens as a surreal city—not defined only by ruins, monuments, and endless concrete blocks but by imaginative futures where humans, animals, and technologies co-inhabit. These works invite us to look again at the public spaces we take for granted and to recognize them as living fields of transformation: stages where the performative city continually unfolds.
Exhibition Information
Organized by: Chaido Karpoulia and Eva Lavranou, with Frideriki Moustaka, for LAVA
LAVA Space, Ippokratous 9, Athens, Greece
Exhibition Dates: 16 October – 18 December 2025
Supported by: LUUN | Archisearch | TILT!
To ensure a smooth and organized experience,
RESERVE YOUR SPOT HERE
Organized by: Chaido Karpoulia and Eva Lavranou, with Frideriki Moustaka, for LAVA
LAVA Space, Ippokratous 9, Athens, Greece
Exhibition Dates: 16 October – 18 December 2025
Supported by: LUUN | Archisearch | TILT!
To ensure a smooth and organized experience,
RESERVE YOUR SPOT HERE
About Athens Surreal.Athens Surreal is a digital art project by Tina Marinaki, a Greek-born architect and visual artist based in New York. Through AI-generated imagery, the project reimagines Athens as a dreamlike, utopian landscape - an ever-shifting cityscape where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary dissolve. A graduate of the University of Patras School of Architecture and Columbia University’s M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design program, Tina currently works as an architectural designer in New York. Her practice embraces a cross-scalar, multimedia approach to design and research, focusing on the evolving relationship between architecture, representation, and AI. Her work has been exhibited at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Benaki Museum, the 6th Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the International Biennial of Landscape Architecture in Barcelona, and the EMST Athens.
Ippokratous 9, 10679
Athens, Greece