Riviera was a public art commission led by Towner Eastbourne in collaboration with Devonshire Collective, made with artist Navine G. Dossos and residents of Eastbourne’s Devonshire Ward.

Over a series of workshops, more than 50 residents worked with Dossos to develop 24 stencils drawn from the life of the ward – its palm trees, gelato shops, the pier, the movie camera, its flora and fauna. Together these became a community-designed textile pattern, printed on three weights of fabric for clothing, upholstery and outdoor use.

The pattern appeared as outdoor awnings at locations across the Devonshire Ward and as an exhibition at VOLT, Devonshire Collective’s gallery, where cuttings of the finished fabric were made freely available to local residents to use in personal objects and clothes of their own.

Riviera reflects a shared interest in the everyday life of the neighbourhood: the long history of British seaside resorts borrowing Mediterranean motifs, and the many communities now living in the Devonshire Ward, brought together in a single, shared visual language.

‍Navine G. Dossos (she/her, b.1982) is a visual artist working between London and Aegina, Greece. Her interests include geometry as information and decoration, image calibration, and Aniconism (the absence of artistic representations or icons) in contemporary culture. She has developed a form of geometric abstraction that merges the traditions coming from Islamic art with the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in. This is not the formal abstraction we understand from the western history of art, but something essentially informational, and committed to investigation and communication. Her work is increasingly developed through collective workshop sessions and exists mostly in the public realm.