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Hundreds evacuated from Croatian and Greek resorts as wildfires stretch across Europe
This Reuters piece focuses on **wildfires in coastal resorts in Croatia and Greece**, describing how fast‑moving flames engulfed homes and tourist areas, killing at least one person, injuring around 40 others, and forcing roughly **1,200 people to evacuate** from a picturesque Croatian town.[5] Offi... Full context
This Reuters piece focuses on **wildfires in coastal resorts in Croatia and Greece**, describing how fast‑moving flames engulfed homes and tourist areas, killing at least one person, injuring around 40 others, and forcing roughly **1,200 people to evacuate** from a picturesque Croatian town.[5] Officials detail how strong winds and dry vegetation allowed the fire to spread quickly through residential zones, damaging properties and infrastructure and disrupting the summer tourism season.[5] The article situates these fires within a wider pattern of **very extreme wildfire conditions across Europe**, citing EU warnings that prolonged heatwaves and drought have made large parts of the continent highly vulnerable to ignition and rapid fire spread.[5][11][14] It notes that firefighting services are stretched thin, with multiple countries dealing simultaneously with blazes, and that the **economic cost of this summer’s fires is estimated to exceed €15 billion**, according to experts referenced by EU environment officials.[14] Local community stories—residents fleeing at night, tourists being moved from hotels, and volunteers helping firefighters—underscore the social impact and anxiety in affected areas.[5] The piece also connects these events to broader **climate and land‑management debates**, reporting that EU policymakers plan to push member states to invest more in nature restoration, forest management, and prevention measures to reduce future wildfire risk and financial losses.[14]
Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires)
In Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires) the artist translates a fast-moving summer disaster into the language of stone and repair. The limestone panel holds deep blackened grooves of flame and the pale, salt-streaked traces of sea spray; carved figures—tourists, residents, volunteers—are reduced to a guarded line moving toward small boats under a horizontal horizon. Bronze pins and stitched linen thread trace visible repairs across fractured surfaces, making the act of mending part of the image itself. Found ephemera—a hotel key card, an evacuation tag, a frayed rope—sit like relics embedded in the relief, their surfaces bleached and scarred.
Marina Costa Ribeiro frames the work as a study of communal endurance and the costs of ecological crisis. The piece points to 1,200 evacuated, to volunteer brigades and to stretched firefighting networks, while also naming the broader forces—very extreme wildfire conditions, prolonged heat and drought—that shape these sudden displacements. The sutures are both practical and moral: visible repairs that insist on memory, care and refusal to smooth over what broke. Rendered in a palette borrowed from the artist’s terrace garden—muted greens, ochres and ash—the relief asks how societies stitch themselves back together after flame, and what reparative investments might look like in a warming Europe whose summer losses now tally in the billions (€15 billion, experts warn).
About the Artist
Marina Costa Ribeiro
Marina Costa Ribeiro (born 1992-09-03) is a 33-year-old Brazilian sculptor and mixed-media artist working primarily with limestone reliefs and representational panels that explore resilience and survi...
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Marco Delacroix
Cultural theorist and curator. Reads art through lenses of discourse, power, and social context.
In Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires) Marina Costa Ribeiro translates a summer disaster into stone and repair. The limestone panel's deep blackened grooves read as scorched topography, while pale salt streaks register sea spray and abrasion. Carved figures, tourists, residents and volunteers, are reduced to a guarded line moving toward small boats under a steady horizontal horizon. Bronze pins and stitched linen make the act of mending part of the image, and found ephemera, a hotel key card, an evacuation tag and a frayed rope sit like relics embedded in relief, their surfaces bleached and scarred. The terrace garden palette of muted greens, ochres and ash gives the surface a skinlike, weathered intimacy.
Formally the piece continues Ribeiro's disciplined negotiation of figuration and abrasion, a practice informed by role playing, repeated variation and a commitment to the hand. The sutures function as both practical interventions and moral claims, insisting that repair remain visible rather than erased. Read against the recent evacuations in Croatian and Greek resorts, where roughly 1,200 people were displaced and economic losses were counted in the billions, the relief stages communal endurance, volunteer labour and stretched firefighting networks. The embedded tags and rope do political work, insofar as they materialize bureaucratic moments of displacement and the residue of emergency response.
My praise is qualified. The work performs an eloquent, somatic testimony to loss and repair, resisting facile consolation by foregrounding fracture and mending. Yet it risks aestheticizing catastrophe if the gesture of visible repair is not coupled with sharper diagnostics of policy failure and responsibility. Even with this reservation, Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires) is a necessary, measured intervention, one that asks institutions and publics how societies will stitch themselves back together in a warming Europe, and what reparative investments will be prioritized.
Materiality and surface treatment Sutures as moral and practical repair Embedded found objects as relics Figurative relief and composition Climate and social contextualization Tension between elegy and structural critiqueAug 28, 2026