What Branches Grow

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?

T.S. Eliot 

Crux Galerie presents What Branches Grow, a solo exhibition by Vangelis Savvas, featuring in situ installations from his latest series of works. For the exhibition, Vangelis Savvas creates a herbarium of the future, where nature reclaims the rural landscape and weeds and roots become both archive and sculptural form.

The exhibition draws from the artist’s vast digital archive. Through processes of 3D scanning and subsequent 3D printing, Vangelis Savvas documents wells, terraces,  and dry-stone walls, structures connected to the agricultural life of his homeland, the Cycladic island of Naxos. Often unrecognized as a form of cultural heritage, these elements are approached here as sites of memory and testimonies to labor, local knowledge, and the imprint of human presence on the land. Through this process of exploration, Savvas also records the wide variety of wild plants growing among these ruins, uncovering them as the rightful heirs to a landscape built by humans.

The main installation is an exact replica of a traditional stone-build aloni (threshing floor), overtaken by an almond tree, and various wild plants. The second part of the exhibition showcases a part of the artist’s collection of 3D reproductions of his scavenger findings, digital fossils engraved on wax and clay, roots and branches imprinted on natural stone.

Through digital displacement, forms and fragments of the landscape are translated into sculptural hybrids of the analog and the digital. In this process, 3D recording technologies operate as active mechanisms for the production of knowledge and memory, shaping the ways in which we perceive our relationship with the environment. In the exhibition, the physical reality gives way to an artificial one, as a token of a moment of magnificence, before the species disappear. The works allow the landscape to persist through memory, cultural narratives, and a revisualisation of a fragile and gradually disappearing ecological and cultural condition.

Vangelis Savvas (born 1990, Naxos) is a visual artist based in Athens. The intersection of art, science, and technology lies at the core of his practice. He uses digital documentation technologies to create an archive of disappearing rural landscapes, which he then translates into sculptural forms through sustainable fabrication methods.

He studied Fine Arts at the University of Ioannina (2010–2016) and holds an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2022–2025). His first solo show Tomorrow is but an assumption took place in 2022 and he has participated in many group exhibitions, including Fluid Motion: The Coexistence of Order and Chaos at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Theorιmata 4 at the Municipal Gallery of Athens, Where the Wild Things Grow supported by NEON, among others.