the pop-up studio

The working space of the ‘velanidi’ residency is established in a pre-industrial home-scale winery of Peleta, built-in 1903. This pop-up studio we have set up on the ground floor of the building offers a spacious place for work and a small but rapidly expanding library of children’s books as well as a corpus of local history books, archival material, and references.

A systematic restoration project is going on—although at a slow pace. The restoration project aims at exploring, researching, and documenting the history as well as the stories of the building, its residents and the surrounding community of Peleta. Our goal is to turn this old winery into a proper studio and a library that will host artists and creatives, accommodate their needs, and provide a space where ideas and dreams will come true.

While the restoration project is underway, resident artists will be hosted in houses provided by the locals of the community of Peleta and will be able to work and show their work in the pop-up studio at the winery premises.

the village

It is said that the village of Peleta took its name from the old Turkish word for oak nuts, ‘pelit’. Giant, centuries-old oak trees still stand scattered around the village, bearing witness to all they have seen and heard.

Peleta of Southern Kynouria is a mountainous village on the southeastern side of Mount Parnon. It is located on a plateau and it is surrounded by smaller settlements and villages.

Most of the residents moved to Peleta from the surrounding mountain villages at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. What brought people to the plateau of Peleta were the opportunities provided by viticulture and the fertile lands of the area. At the same time, the demand for wine-producing vines in Greece, especially in the Peloponnese, peaked since the phylloxera epidemic that appeared in France in 1863 destroyed about two-thirds of European vineyards.

The entire village lifestyle revolved around grape cultivation and wine production. Most of the two-story stone houses feature built wine basins on the ground floor and cellars on the basement level. These spaces served as small-scale pre-industrial winemaking facilities, many of which are still intact today.

NOTE from the curators of the Velanidi program

If it wasn’t for books, our dreams wouldn’t have wings, and our imaginations wouldn’t rise. Children’s books hold a special magic, whispering secrets of far-off lands, teaching us kindness and courage, and painting our world with the colors of wonder and joy. For them, we hold a special place in our hearts. For them, we created ‘Velanidi’ as a way to give children’s book creatives a chance to flourish and give books wings to fly into the world. Let us introduce ourselves:

As an art historian and anthropologist, I have learned to understand places, explore localities and local identities, to search for and find stories and histories that connect people with their environment, their past, their heritage, and their landscape. I’ve learned to research in many different ways, even through art. Ethnographic research has brought me close to many different places. I returned to Peleta after a generation’s absence to learn from and about the village, which I now proudly call ‘my village.’ But everything, as always, begins with a seed. This time the seed is ‘Velanidi,’ a place where we share the adventure of research with the people of children’s books

Katerina Konstantinou

Papers, pens, notebooks, and books have been essential parts of my childhood and adult life. My studies in art history and my subsequent work experience in the publishing industry revealed my love for anything tangible that contains art: the art of words, the art of pictures, and so many others. ‘Velanidi’ is this mystical place that brings together art and books that I love with people and nature that I’ve been longing for. If I were to value the things that surround me, I would focus on people and the significance of sharing, caring, and concern, especially when all these find a place to flourish in unexpected and dreamy spaces.

Georgia Souvatzi