What does the future look like through your eyes?

The title is a Greek pun that turns out to be a thesis. EIKΟΛΟΓΙΑ - eikologia - folds together εικόνα, image, and οικολογία, ecology. A visual ecology. Seeing as an act of care.

It was made by thirty young people on Lesvos, aged fifteen to seventeen, working with the artist Gen Daquinan across nine workshops.

Who

The participants came from villages at the edges of the island. Low-income households. Rural, remote, and largely absent from any conversation about the island's environmental future, despite being the people who will live in it longest.

Lesvos carries a maritime heritage built on fishing, agriculture and migration routes, and it now carries rising temperatures, water scarcity, rural depopulation and economic uncertainty. Its young people navigate all of this daily, holding a deep attachment to a place they are not confident will hold.

The method

Daquinan, whose own childhood was spent in a flood-prone area, built the workshops around a single question - what does the future look like through your eyes? - and then handed over the means to answer it.

Peer interviews first, so that participants heard each other before they heard an adult. Then technical training in photography. Then the island: eroded shorelines, abandoned farmland, seasons arriving in the wrong order. The young people photographed what they valued, what they feared losing, and what they hoped to protect.

The peer interviews surfaced something difficult. Asked to imagine the future of Lesvos, many described something close to dystopia - isolation, abandonment, a place emptied out. Those visions were not corrected or argued with. They were sat with, and then, gradually, worked into something else: place-based narratives about what might make it possible to stay.

Handing over the work

As the process went on, the young people took over the decisions that mattered. They named the project. They designed the exhibition. The final workshop turned photographs and reflections into a zine - chosen as a format because a zine circulates. It leaves the school. It leaves the gallery. It ends up on somebody's kitchen table.

Positioning participants as co-authors rather than subjects is easy to write in a methodology document and difficult to do. Here it is visible in the artefact itself: the images belong to the people who took them.

What happened

Around one hundred people saw the work through the public exhibition and the circulation of the zine.

Participants described the experience as transformative, which is a word that gets used too easily and is being used precisely here: several said that climate change had stopped being a distant, abstract issue and had become something attached to their own island and their own lives. Seeing their photographs on a wall, in public, and watching adults look at them carefully, positioned them as people with something to say.

Visitors, for their part, came away with an intimate view of what young people on Lesvos actually think - which turned out to bear very little resemblance to the assumption that they are disengaged or apathetic.

The work was reflective and activist at the same time. It reshaped a local narrative. It made room for a set of voices that island planning had not previously required.