Dimitra Gounari

Dimitra Gounari is a Greek photographic artist, researcher and educator whose practice explores landscape, memory and the expressive possibilities of digital transformation. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sound and Image at the Ionian University in Greece, holds an MA in Image and Communication from Goldsmiths, University of London, and graduated from the Department of Photography of the Athens University of Applied Sciences.

In her series Flaming Trees (2017-2021), Gounari investigates the landscape as both natural space and cultural memory. Starting from photographs of trees taken in 2017 and later transformed after the devastating fire in North Evia in 2021, she creates composite digital images that move beyond documentary representation.

Rather than describing catastrophe directly, her work transforms the wounded landscape into a visual field of reflection. Colour, contrast, fragmentation and digital manipulation become tools to express change, loss and survival. The trees remain present, but altered, carrying the memory of a place whose form has been radically transformed.

Her practice invites viewers to think more deeply about the relationship between human intervention and the natural environment, turning photography into a space where ecological awareness, visual experimentation and emotional memory meet.

Curatorial Critical Note

Dimitra Gounari’s Flaming Trees series approaches landscape not as a passive view, but as a living and wounded space. The natural environment becomes a site of memory, transformation and cultural meaning.

What makes the work particularly interesting is its distance from simple documentation. Gounari does not use photography only to record what happened. She uses the photographic image as a material to be reworked, displaced and transformed. Through digital manipulation, the landscape becomes unstable, almost visionary, revealing the emotional and symbolic consequences of environmental destruction.

The trees in these works are not merely trees. They become presences, bodies, witnesses. Their altered colours and fragmented surfaces suggest both damage and persistence. The image carries the violence of change, but also the remaining energy of what survives.

In this sense, Flaming Trees creates a dialogue between ecological trauma and visual reconstruction. The catastrophe of fire is not shown as spectacle. It is translated into a new photographic language, where abstraction and recognition coexist.

Gounari’s work interests NNC Gallery because it combines conceptual clarity, photographic research and a strong sensitivity to place. Her practice reminds us that landscape is never only nature. It is memory, history, loss, transformation and responsibility.