Karla Lake lies in Thessaly, Greece. In the 50’s, the Greek government decided to manage this lake in order to decrease incidents of malaria, to help manage yearly flooding and to increase the number of agricultural fields as there has been noted a decrease in the fish population. However, studies showed that the lake should only be restricted to an area of 6,470 hectares, and in the end, Karla Lake was completely drained.

 

Message in a Bottle aimed to gather the voices of teenagers living near Karla Lake who were given the opportunity to tell “their story”, “refilling” the lake with their memories, thoughts and dreams. Alexander Schellow (Visual Artist) and Valya Stergioti (Environmental Interpreter) acted as a catalyst between the teenagers and the Lake. They designed a series of questions to trigger the imagination and inspire the children to tell their stories and their connections with the lake. Schellow also created a visual infrastructure of the project, which in one aspect concerned visual materials applied in the workshop, and on the other hand, acted as the base of an online environment, gradually enlarged and transformed by the accumulating contributions of the children.

 

The children were able to reconnect with memories of older members of their families, their own experiences of living near a new/old lake, as well as their views about the lake’s future (and how this relates with their own future). To do so, they used a multitude of media. The combination of these different medias was their “message” which we will helped them to put into a virtual “bottle”.