This year's edition of the Reveil Festival of Sound and Ecology was completed with great success on Saturday May 3rd, 2025 at the Flora and Fauna Preservation Park of the Technical University of Crete (TUC) with a program of activities aiming to raise awareness about the environment, wildfires and sustainability, as well as featuring innovative collaborations with the Public Junior High School of Kounoupidiana, the Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change at TUC, the TUC Radio Entasi 93.5 FM team, the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society (London, UK) and the European University on Responsible Consumption and Production (EURECA-PRO).
The Park opened its doors to the public early in the morning. Since 8 a.m., visitors had the opportunity to listen to Reveil in the courtyard of the Park's outpost. Reveil is a 24-hour radio programme with live broadcasts of daybreak soundscapes from all over the world. Since 2014, the program is being curated by the artistic organization Soundcamp based in London, Hague and Chania and each year it is accompanied by a series of satellite events in different cities across Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States of America. The live daybreak broadcasts became one with the surrounding environment in the Park's outpost through a discreet sound installation curated by the Radio Entasi team.
The Park’s Museum opened its doors from 9 a.m. to share with the public the art exhibition entitled "Little Green Sea". Inspired by the poem of the same title by Odysseas Elytis, the "Little Green Sea" unfolded through the photographs, sketches, images, botanical collections, sculptures, sounds and constructions of students of the Public Junior High School of Kounoupidiana, which took part in the environmental program entitled "Anthology of a Wandering". The programme and the exhibition were curated by the teachers Aspa Theochari (English teacher) and Eleni Lykaki (Biology teacher) in collaboration with a group of students from the C', B' and A' grades of the school. The projects were shaped by the students through a series of weekly meetings (December 2024 through April 2025) in the context of field research that included group or individual walks, activities and tours of the group in the Park.
As the teachers who coordinated the group and curated the exhibition explain,
"[the] acquaintance with all the spaces of the Park, the natural materials and the aesthetic stimuli, were inspired and artistically imprinted by the students of the Group. Their sensual depiction weaved webs of images and sounds, composing and unraveling a teenage story of 'wandering' through flowers, threads and words."
"The Park became our 'Little Green Sea', a piece of Mediterranean Greek nature, indestructible and new, which we only adopted for a while, but took under our protection. A space of harmony, balance and musicality that shouted to our teenage students to 'turn the sun and listen'."
The threads of this "Little Green Sea" were spread everywhere in the Park. The route from the entrance to the museum was framed by artistic interventions by the students with sculptural chairs made of leaves, branches and other raw materials that the students collected during the field research they did over the past several months in the Park. Personal items, clothing and other objects that the students used during their research were placed at various points within the route, thus creating a thread that thematically connected the entrance and outpost of the Park with the threshing floor and the museum, as well as the Park's greenhouse. The works of the students reconstructed the Park with great detail, empathy and artistic excellence, highlighting its seasonality and biodiversity, thus capturing its multidimensional and ephemeral beauties.
This year's event also focused on Wildfires, a very relevant theme in Greece. The curator of the festival, Dr. Maria Papadomanolaki, approached this topic through different activities aimed at raising public awareness and highlighting its local and global dimension. The screening of the multi-award-winning short documentary directed by Yiannis Mathioudakis, entitled "Ashes", and the discussion with the Director himself touched on a series of questions about the management of forest fires at the level of community, state and private initiative. As he stated, this particular film emerged through a program of the Hellenic Parliament, where students from different Greek University Departments related to film studies, collaborated online to create short films on the subject of the environment. Mr. Mathioudakis chose to talk about wildfires, an issue that is both very closely linked to Crete and very accessible. The story of Iliana from Melampes in Rethymno, although already known to the local media, through the film acquires a more narrative dimension that highlights all aspects of the issue with a more human, experiential and realistic look, making the film more accessible the wider audience but also approaching the topic with a more optimistic point of view, as the Director stated.
Following the film screening, researchers Dr. Chrysa Vamvakaki and Dr. Konstantina Paraskevopoulou, members of the Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change of TUC, spoke about the research carried out by the laboratory on wildfires, linking them to climate change and sustainability. They then took the members of the audience to an educational walk in the Park to learn in an experiential way how to recognize the different species of flora and relate them to fires. The educational activity ended with an interactive quiz, where the best players won small gifts, sponsored by EURECA-PRO.
The opening of the photographic exhibition entitled "Wildfires Through the Researcher’s Lens" highlighted the global dimension of the theme and presented sustainable methods of management and control of forest fires. The eight photographs that adorn the entrance of the Park have been taken by doctoral students and academic staff during field research in areas affected by fires. From Turkey and Greece to Brazil and Laos, the investigative lenses of the photographers-researchers engage with the natural world with great care, empathy and sensitivity. The collection raises awareness not only about wildfires as natural catastrophes on a global scale, but also presents sustainable methods of managing and controlling them. The exhibition was made possible through the collaboration of the Flora and Fauna Preservation Park and the Technical University of Crete with the EURECA-PRO TUC team and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society (London, UK). The opening of the exhibition was foreworded with two short presentations by Dr. Evan Diamadopoulos, Professor Emeritus of the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Scientific Coordinator of EURECA-PRO TUC, as well as Dr. Apostolos Voulgarakis, Professor of the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Center.
Referring to the important role of such an exhibition in connecting research and society, Dr. Diamantopoulos stressed that:
Today's event is of particular importance because it is an event that is addressed to society and it is also an event that has a scientific dimension but also has an artistic, social, humanitarian dimension and therefore covers a much broader field which is basically the goal of a University but is also a broader strategic goal of the European University for Responsible Consumption and Production (EURECA-PRO) which is a new initiative of the European Union.
Dr. Voulgarakis, in turn, emphasized the interrelated relationship between locality and the global context:
We live in a place but at the same time we are also citizens of the world, it is nice to understand that what we have around us and protect is part of a global set of environments that we also have to protect. Our team at the Technical University of Crete studies climate change and its connection with fires from the global level to the very local... Environmental problems are not only global or only local, we need to understand the global dimension, but also how to raise awareness and act at a local level. That's why I think that places like the Flora and Fauna Preservation Park and events like this one are very important.
The exhibition remains at the entrance of the Park and the public can visit it at any time of the day and learn more about the photos through the scan of a QR code.
The Festival closed with the musical performance of the Environmental Team of the Public Junior High School of Kounoupidiana, where the students, through lyrics, melodies, and sounds, unfolded for the last time the thread of their teenage wandering in the Park and moved the audience. The music instruction of the group was coordinated by Isavella Stavridou (Music teacher) and the selection of the pieces was co-curated by Mrs. Stavridou together with Mrs. Theochari. The sophisticated program included poems by Odysseas Elytis set to music, such as "Kato stis Margaritas to Alonaki - Down by Margarita’s Threshing Floor" with music by Yiannis Markopoulos or "To Magissaki - The Little Witch" by Nena Venetsanou, but also traditional songs from Greece, such as "Apano stin Triantafylia - Upon the Rose Tree ", from England, such as "Bushes and Briars", and from the island of the Hebrides in Scotland, such as "The People Who Have Gardens", as well as emblematic compositions by Manos Hadjidakis, such as "Ta paidia Kato Ston Kampo - The Children Down the Plains" or "O Efialtis Tis Persefonis - The Nightmare of Persephone" with lyrics by Nikos Gatsos, with which the performance ended impressively in colors, as the advent of the blue hour began.
Listen to an audio recording of the musical performance, recorded and mastered by Dr. Papadomanolaki. You can also view a photo album with selected photographs from the event, a video of the opening of the photo exhibition and another video of the music performance. All are available also on the right column of this post.
