FEATURES & INTERVIEWS
2025-2026
Tributaries to form a new grammar – a seismic reading centering practitioners of design, artists, and photographers whose work exemplifies novel horizons.
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There is a gesture of a fisherman in Fukushima, whose desire to release his net is never stilled in momentum, even though he cannot eat his return of labour due to exposed radiation. The act is what French-German photographer Rebekka Deubner described as a form of forced “preservation” with a changed or obscured finality. The human, in face of change, finds continuum in the defining inscription of their traces. On December 03, 2011, the north-east-coast was impacted by three major catastrophes: a naval quake, tsunami, and the explosion of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, formalizing a forbidden zone of thirty kilometers encircling the site. This imagined fence became a precipice to enter the reality of the impact across scales of representation.
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As the camera becomes an inscription of sight, the stage of framing and those depicted requires a delineation of spirit, solidifying a reveal of intention from the latent image. This becomes the alchemy of the darkroom; a value-system of image creation where nothing is certain until the effect of appearance becomes visible. The rays of a cityscape oscillate in the moving hands of a child’s navigation, and the territory’s angular face is fragmented, perceptible in parts – a fragrant re-establishment of identity. Within a stone building of pronounced arches, just above a silver filigree workshop, Fotohane Darkroom in Mardin, Turkey, was built by Syrian photographer Serbest Salih and Turkish-born Amar Kılıç, providing the infrastructure for a communal darkroom and photographic workshop for the region’s local and displaced children. Sourcing 35mm point-and-shoot cameras and film stocks from manufacturers Ilford, Kodak, and Fujifilm, the Darkroom’s ethos encourages the creation of resonant meanings amongst the participants in their evocation of placeness and its outlines of receptivity.
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Athens Design Forum presents Cloisonné, a photographic series by Spanish photographer Adrià Cañameras in Beijing, China.
There is a cosmology of partitions that the form of cloisonné permits. With each copper enclosure and distinct line, the potential to emulate the infrastructure of a honeycomb presents itself. Barcelona-born photographer Adrià Cañameras on assignment to document Hotel Xitan in July 2025 within the Mentougou District outside Beijing, met Li Jing, a ceramic artist whose mosaic framed the hotel’s entrance. At the recommendation of Jing, Cañameras visited China’s now heritage-listed enamel factory, 北京珐琅厂(Beijing Enamel Factory Co., Ltd). The following series presents the labyrinthine system of exchange that characterizes the craftsman’s immediate and unforsaken surroundings – pigments, national flags, fans, gloves, locks, and keys. The enamel body that has been centralized and prized, on the pedestal of many courts, is seen through its construction.
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“After death, time and chronology will be lost in a sphere of symbols.”
from El Hacedor (Dreamtigers), J. L. BorgesThere exists a tone of demarcation, a spirit underserved by the limit of time. In the photographic archive of Lebanese-Danish architect Paolo Barkett, a domestic space is rendered permissible; disassociated from a fixed state, an interior digresses toward a mirage with the known absence of a protagonist. Seals of authorship are soaked in deep, saturated abandon. The light of Nordic starkness surrenders to the image of a woman’s chambers at the moment of perceived regression.
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a bridge towards the agora
It is the balcony of one mnemonic time.
In the image of an iconostasis rebuilt – where the farmers once plowed, the agora emerged, plot after plot, and the polyphony of their intentions brought forth one, or many, miracles: ones that must be saved. “For us, it is a lifetime,” they say, and the lights dim on the rooftop of this old structure, its cornice weathered. Through the scent of bread and coffee, the market of Kallithea puts to flame a new century into being.
(Words) Katerína Papanikolopoulos
(Images) Irini Stamatiadi -
“For we are wounded by invisible swords from the blue” – Francisco Garcia Lorca, The Cicada
Where there is a recurring sound of wings in motion, Lorca’s The Cicada deciphers a limit of blue — not as horizon, not as a finality — but a ferment of colour to make legible the “invisible swords”. Perhaps it is the sea or the sky that pacifies in a tone so known that its outline always carries a weight of recognition. When Papamichail sent me a fresco of the military saint Saint George, his sword a sign of true strength separating good from evil, from the perspective of scaffolding for the restoration of the Gelati Cathedral, Lorca’s words provided an entry into this feature.
Athens Design Forum presents the fragmented archive of Georgian interior architect and designer, Eka Papamichail.
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When the mind proliferates images of accord, and designers form the enunciabilities of a nation, the archive is burnished to a dimension bound in static proportion. The velocity and range of a country’s aesthetic regime is articulated in the power of graphic form, surpassing solely the built, concentrated in the mobile projections – record covers, magazines, catalogues, books. Forging a timeline vulnerable to erosion, Venezuelan graphic designer Ricardo Báez formatted a potent repository, Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela, enabling introspection into types of corporate sponsorship routinely tied to oil extraction, such as El Farol magazine, “where Venezuelans themselves got to know their country through the eyes of a US oil company, Creole”. Pulsating forward new perceptions of modernity, these graphic articles were clearly defined by the engines of industry.
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In the ash-soaked images of Chilean filmmaker and photographer Rodrigo Vergara, a critical substance emerges from latent states. Collisions and ruptures permeate seams of reality – doors, roofs, even the hide of a horse, become canonical figures. What is absurd gains a leverage of permanence. Within Pablo Neruda’s ‘Suddenly, A Ballad’ from Memoirs from the Black Island, a novel entity emerges from an ash bed, coercing a sacred effect: “Something is born in the depths of this, that was once ash, and the cup trembles with red wine.” One begins to believe that Vergara assumes such a role, observing in excelsis the consequential and once interrupted acts of mankind and its greater earthly mother.
The following images are born from sites across Chilé – Pucón, Santiago, Illapel – November 2021-May 2025.
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Within Palazzo Cusani’s Via del Carmine façade in Milan, the wars carved into the stone emerge as the sole decorative feature of the architecture. Ornaments are tools to define relationships; to exploit difference, to create opposition, contrast. They take place in relation to space; specifically, along the action of entering the building or walking by it. They are not perceived in autonomy but in sequence: all the parts of this war-carousel display the strength that this palace wanted to represent.
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Athens Design Forum presents ‘SALON PHILIPPE’, an interview conceptualized by Lebanese designer Youssef Bassil on the fractal identity of a barbershop (est. 1968) in Achrafieh, Lebanon. An anatomy of the interior works in material counterpoint, affixed by years of quiet fortitude – the original Lebanese-made cast iron barberchairs, chrome-dipped and baptised with a signage of ‘Venus’, are reflected in the softness of formica walls and melamine counters. In Bassil’s composition, an anthology of belonging traces the disappearance of citrus trees and grape vines as the city center of Lebanon ever-rises in the portrait of Philippe Aaoun, ‘SALON PHILIPPE’.
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“Revisiting the figure of the pirquinero allowed me to explore a specific form of resistance—one that continues to express itself through exclusion.” – Javier Aravena Costa
Athens Design Forum presents Escombros and La Memoria de la Forma by Chilean researcher and photographer Javier Aravena Costa. When extraction is articulated as a symptom of industrial annunciation, architectural permanence is dismantled. In the absorption of a geography’s lack or abundance, Costa deciphers the conscious alternation of landscape and how ‘new contexts of resistance’ inform the forging of territorial identity.
Within Escombros (debris), the pirquinero (small-scale miner) embodies a legacy of pre-Hispanic mining in northern Chile. Costa mediates on the weight of language:
“With Escombros, I began by translating Quechua words—this allowed me to locate the origins of a technique through language, its history, and symbolic weight. The aim is to reframe the technique of the pirquinero, reclaiming its history and meaning through the act of chiseling and deconstructing concrete—particularly in resistance to the neoliberal model that emerged following the social uprising of October 18, 2019.”
There is an indigenous, linguistic threshold that permeates sites of inhabitation—evidenced in the timely neglect depicted within La Memoria de la Forma, which focuses on traditional building techniques such as adobe and quincha (timber framework with mud). Centered in Chile’s norte chico, these architectures, now fading, are gradually reintegrating into the earth they came from.
Seen spherically on a unified axis, Costa’s photographic medium engenders a new potentiality and universal paradigm: what is abstracted, near dissolution, is set free or at least back to the very fundamental unit of life where it once sprung from. A conversation in dialogue with the artist follows.
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“The pursuit of forms is only a pursuit of time, but if there are no stable forms, there are no forms at all.”¹—Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance
In the wake of archaeological photographic images, we may begin to decipher Paul Virilio’s conception of the sensorial mass: how the stabilized form of an excavated artifact becomes eternalized within the cage of a photograph. If photography functions as a penetrative method to assert an influence of cementation, then the decisions that remain unspoken—placement, framing, repetition—are prolonged in time. In this stillness, a series of anomalies accumulate.
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Athens Design Forum presents Lebanese artist Ayla Hibri’s chain of thematic photographic essays—Toys, Metal Welders, and Dreamers. In their three-fold partition, the essays relay the transgression of matter into the praxis of authorship. Across the territories of Jordan, Eritrea, and beyond, Hibri navigates the thresholds between the particular and the universal, always attentive to laws of patterns and the acts of once undefined rituals.
In Toys, childhood becomes a site of entry into the psyche and fantasy of creation—a fluent survival mechanism forgotten with age. In the welding yards of Medeber, the rhythm of an ancient trade is embodied by masks that reveal a resilient form of masculine rite, identified by Hibri as “bending the physical world to their will.” As a cosmic epilogue, Dreamers isolates provisional zones of belonging to form a phenomenon: “architecture often resists the sleeper, yet exhaustion brings about a temporary truce,” evident in the transformation of public and private domains. Hibri’s photographic method acts as both microscope and telescope, assembling a cartography of intimacies and improvisations. An archive opens where the incidental forms a lasting testimony.
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Athens Design Forum presents Argentinian photographer and director Francisco Canton’s series, Offset, a penetrative entry into the forensic rhythm between frames. "The choreography of these images arises from a limit I impose on myself," Canton notes, "using timing and sequence to create a rhythm and sense of continuity in the work." Repetition reveals rupture and familiarity becomes estrangement, evolving forward in the innocuous presence of a metronome.
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Athens Design Forum (ADF) steps quietly into a new season with a lucid typographic identity: Kolonia, a typeface designed by Dominik Bissem, a graduate of ECAL’s Master’s program in Type Design (2023). Built from the foundation of F. H. Ernst Schneidler’s 1923 Deutsch-Römisch, Kolonia moves between eras with exacting precision — its opulent curves and understated presence giving it a percussive body. Reminiscent of the great typographies that adorned artistic catalogues published in Athens throughout the 1950s-1970s, Bissem animates the characterization of the font: “Glyphs like the dancing g, the number 3, the dagger-like 7, or the question mark clearly refer to the calligraphic background of the original and are important features of Kolonia,” with more philosophical musings behind Kolonia’s enduring design to follow.
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Athens Design Forum invites Egyptian photographer Mariam El Gendy for an in-depth feature on her personal observations – a sensory continuum where architectural structures wrought with visible labor systems, born out of improvisation, become central protagonists. In an anthropological and deeply critical approach, El Gendy deciphers a longitude of belonging where she discerns, “I’ve always felt that when a subject engages with their surroundings, they shape the image themselves.” Across sites such as playgrounds, parks, urban highways, markets, and clinics – we witness Egypt’s transcending pulse and a means to reconcile with the bridge of instinct.
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In the lasting images of Argentine sculptor Luna Paiva, one senses the artisan’s relationship with landscapes of movement and the immateriality of a gesture shared amongst youth. Athens Design Forum invites Paiva to share a dialogue and photo essay on the choreography of play; how she imagined a sculptural playground for an orphanage in Amizmiz, Morocco, once the epicenter of the earthquake, in a collective effort towards reconstruction. In questioning the reality of creation, an introspection unfolds from the modeling process, assessing the body’s axis, and the reiteration of Zellige tiles to be ever-changing as the day travels to night. What began as a series of drawn black-ink portals were built to become a rooted monument – alight with the intention to transform whoever comes upon them.
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If we begin with the image of faded mirrors, like the tarnished skin of a mulberry tree by the river bed, we sense the sweat of the body exhumed to a dark veneer. We walk the corridors of Torino city towards the River Po’s edge, onwards, shadowing a continuous image of the solitary interior Carlo Mollino set after his death. Athens Design Forum presents the commissioned essay “CARLO MOLLINO. Architettura. Arte e Segreto” a philosophical projection by Fulvio Ferrari, curator of the Museo Casa Mollino in Turin, Italy. Ferrari contends, “The bond that unites architecture and philosophy, two worlds that seemingly have no common ground, is Reason.” We pace urgently to re-encounter the fingerprints of a God among us – in what is the first written account of Mollino’s affinity towards Greek heritage, amongst other deeply woven ideologies of antiquity. Ferrari’s words are joined by Ecuadorian photographer Andrés Altamirano’s images – a chorus of dark ink shot primarily in black and white – to penetrate a world the eye can only discern as a non-fascimile.
‘The Skin of River Po, Carlo Mollino’ with Fulvio Ferrari and Andrés Altamirano
FEATURES & INTERVIEWS
2023-2024
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Athens Design Forum presents a selection from Greek-Lebanese artist Georges Salameh’s WHITE MIDDLE SEA (ongoing since 2010).
Salameh discerns: “The Mediterranean Sea (المتوسط الأبيض البحر - the White Middle Sea in Arabic) is the geological and intangible heritage of all identity sedimentations. Open basin or cosmopolitan diversity, graveyard to three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe.”A conversation follows with Athens Design Forum founder, Katerina Papanikolopoulos and Georges Salameh.
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In Levenson’s prefix within A Sense of The Earth, the city and built structure are dismantled in terms of natural materials, with origins that surpass the visible eye. He asks us to redeem extraction as a method of acknowledging the naturalness preserved around us, albeit in its haunting, imposing forms.
Portrait of a Space - Kozani harnesses the depths of Levenson’s lament and one meets the projections of memory onto place. Athens Design Forum invites photographer Yannis Drakoulidis to encounter the landscapes of his grandmother’s home in Kozani, Greece. In an exterior photograph, red geraniums in the shade of concrete columns are affixed by the speed of a passing car. Taken periodically from 2009 to 2019, the photographs share the interior and exterior gardens Anastasia formed alongside the memory of her husband, Charalampos. During the summer months, the ‘magazi’ (μαγαζί), a former ground floor warehouse, transformed into a modular space outfit with the daily necessities of the inhabitants.
In the winter of 2024, Drakoulidis revisits the space – encountering a new family and the silhouette of an interior garden that still remains, a circular trace of remembrance.
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In a world of infinite circumstances, few believe in the multiplicity of form – or seek to philosophize concepts of matter that have been routinely displaced of their mystery. Miguel Leiro is amongst those who walk in the passage of the sacred and the profane, a man of contemporary dimensions.
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In the cosmology of lace, the fortitude and diasporic identity of Armenians is present.
As if the threaded constellations are joined in an impermeable dance, the action of intent remains in engaged connection. Athens Design Forum speaks with curator Gassia Armenian on the conscious cultural multiplicity of lacemaking, and the spirit that arises from a craft where fingers and thread pulsate forward intricate webs of meaning.
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There is a conscious thread that ties man to his son, and within the nexus of a craftsman, these traits and intricacies of identity become submerged in the translation of one’s knowledge to the other. Miltiadis II Vithoulkas, a name derived from the Greek word for “red earth” sits with his son, George II Vithoulkas, a name imbued with the earth,“earthworker.” I meet both men in their restoration atelier and antique store on Erechtheiou Street (est. 1987 – Athens), and while savoring sweet liqueur, we unveil their ethos of furniture making and restoration, a tale of makers whose embodiment of their craft evinces the pleasure of giving.
Athens Design Forum’s 2023-2024 season introduces ANTHROPOS-TOPOS, a universally contingent theme that dissects how humans and places coexist at the proxy of design. Under this theme, ADF ‘In Praxis’ presents the photographic archive of George Vithoulkas I’s furniture restoration projects from the early 1940s-1970s during the craftsman’s transition from Zakynthos to Athens. ADF unearths this archive as a space for re-inscription, pressing forward the evolving idea of design as a threshold tied to human action. An act of preservation, this record instills and recognizes design as an investigative tool into the social upbringing of an era. Pulsating with the drive and commitment of three generations worth of restoration craftsmen, their stories are as titular and symbolic as the items they honorably pursue to save. This previously unseen archive is now digitized with the support of Athens Design Forum.
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Athens Design Forum speaks with Palestinian designer Dima Srouji following the 2022 six-year retrospective of Hollow Forms and our presentation of Phoenician Pigeons in Brussels, Belgium. Papanikolopoulos and Srouji uncover images and narratives of resistance enveloped by the praxis of craftsmanship – from shared meals with artisans in Jaba’ to the longevity and palimpsest ecosystem of glass production.
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“Our environment is deeply connected from the soil and dust to the flowers and ash to the very alive inanimate forms produced from the land…” Dima Srouji – October 31, 2023
Athens Design Forum resurfaces archival material sourced from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, found in preparation for our 2022 collaboration with Palestinian designer Dima Srouji presenting ‘Phoenician Pigeons’ in Brussels, Belgium. This collaboration spearheaded Palestinian-Greek cultural relations through the inaugural showcase of their collective glass histories. Srouji approaches glass as a lens to decipher how archaeological sites and artifacts in Palestine are weaponized, becoming mediums for serial displacement and colonization.
THE DIALECTIC OF FILM
Athens Design Forum’s curatorial programming prioritizes film and photography as integral, critical methodologies to decipher design’s social role. The medium of film acts as a space for re-inscription.
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In the lexicon of images, a silence grows that submerges one frame into the other. Athens Design Forum presents an interview with directors Nicolas Graux and Truong Minh Quy of Hair, Paper, Water…, after the London premiere of the film at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Saigon’s labyrinthine system of buildings and infrastructure evokes a mediated artifice to the protagonist Cao Thi Hau’s known world, born in a cave within the Ruc community of Vietnam. The film’s structure of reference becomes the Ruc language, a ‘spine’ to elementally build associations. A sonic axis creates an integral emotional continuity to soften the ephemerality of a Bolex camera’s vocal remoteness. As Truong Minh denotes, “The form of the film is partly what is not named. For me, a film is also what is absent.” Disappearance is rendered immovable as the natural world is encountered through words (mother’s milk, fire, cave, water…) – surmounting a vocabulary of recognition that is as percussive yet fragile as the ecosystem of the human condition.
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For Milan Design Week 2025, Athens Design Forum presents a screening of Tomka dhe shokët e tij (Tomka and His Friends) by director Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007), hosted by Dropcity Center for Architecture and Design.
On the banks and in the whirlpools of Osum River, arteries of retaliation coalesce and forge, forming the legacy of Tomka and His Friends by Albanian Director Xhanfise Keko. With a pressing score by Aleksandër Lalo, the narrative is woven with fervor and a claim to nationhood that surpasses merely the cinematographic. The senses are foremost a symbol of youth and resistance expressed through four best friends: Tomka, Çelo, Vaska, and Gëzim. Their boyhood, eclipsed by the onslaught of the German occupation in a fictional recounting, becomes prime edifice for a film to engender new realities. Following years of Italian occupation (1939–1943), the film recounts the introduction of the German troops into Berat (1943–1944) centralized on the figure of Tomka, who recounts: “They’ve taken over our field. The only playground we had, and they had to invade it. Let’s play on the street, after all, the road is ours.” The playground of the children on Osum river’s edge is occupied by German troops who use it to store ammunition, forming a core conflict that ultimately becomes the site for possible intervention. Keko humanizes the historical weight of partisan resistance in the Second World War and offers a counterpart to examine Albania’s enduring opposition under the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha.
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In the closing sequence of Tomka and His Friends (1977), the Albanian village of Berat is deciphered solely in the night through the Ottoman windows, shown through the ignition of lanterns that come to frame the city's awakening. The legacy of Albania’s renowned director Xhanfise Keko rests on the shoulders of this ending. Athens Design Forum invites Genc Permeti of Ska-Ndal Productions—producer, screenwriter, and advocate of Albanian cinema—for an exclusive interview in homage to featuring Tomka and His Friends (1977) by Xhanfise Keko for Milan Design Week 2025 at Dropcity Center for Architecture and Design. The film’s enduring language and intentional engagements with architectural discourse are embodied in Keko’s reflection, “It is no coincidence that resistance unfolds in the few places collectively owned by the city's inhabitants.” Permeti’s interview is animated with excerpts from Keko’s memoir “The Days of My Life” (2007), published in English for the first time with the guidance of Keko’s son, film director Ilir Keko. Chronicling an artistic journey over 79 years, the shared conversation solidifies narratives that shaped a filmic cultural revolution beyond Albania’s borders.
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Athens Design Forum presents the early documentaries of Mexican Director Juan Pablo González: The Solitude of Memory (2014) and Caballerango (2018). Juan Pablo González returns to his place of birth within the agricultural communities of Jalisco, Mexico, forming a gesture of re-recognition. Quotidian landscapes – barbershops, butcher shops, nail salons – alongside dense agricultural plots, become the sites where a community of sowers come to mourn the death by suicide of Nando, a horse wrangler’s son. Bereft of their land, they form a wound of resistance that grows and crusts over. The Solitude of Memory, a precursor to the feature documentary film, Caballerango, centers on the protagonist José, Nando’s father, and the last words he said to his son. With the director’s voice an integral element that softly brings to surface elements of a community in the shadows – just as in the metaphorical image of a sower who tills in hopes of a fertile overturn – Juan Pablo González emancipates his protagonists, allowing stillness to be as provocative as a vision of elongated movement. Through themes of religion, political activism, labor, and camaraderie, González’s films sensitively portray the agricultural communities of Jalisco, grounding their narratives in the landscape as a silent yet penetrative witness.
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The primal bend and curvature of Nemércka, a mountain cordillera spanning the border between Albania and Greece, resembles a sleeping woman. Avrilios Karakostas surrenders to the complex origin of this image in his debut short film Nemércka (13”, 2016). In the film, the mountain transforms into an axis where the polyphonic laments of the region are soldered and materialized. As Karakostas contends, “Throughout the film, death functions as a constant, while life is a continuous form of movement.” Athens Design Forum invites Karakostas to revisit the film’s infrastructure, positioning the production archives as records of independent filmmaking that expose new ways of understanding the human condition. Coalescing resources from location scouting and the set design process, the film becomes a medium of entry into the spatial parameters of loss and absence. As a man grieves the death of his wife, places touched by the deceased become the central foci in the lives of the protagonists, cementing a poignant experience of Greek cinema.
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Where there is a valley of roads, and the individual becomes a scale of the masses, a city unfolds to show itself. This phenomenon, so uniquely hidden, is revealed in Hicham Gardaf’s testament to film as a conduit of the senses. The spectator surrenders to see what has been obstructed at the core of industry and commerce. In Praise of Slowness (Hicham Gardaf, 2023) harnesses sight to elongate movement. The sounds of Tangier pace urgently and yet slowly, defining the protagonist’s vocal and physical trade of selling bleach. Gardaf writes:
“The ears / tell the eyes / where to look / the feet / follow / the sound / from the center / of the puzzling labyrinth”
Athens Design Forum and co-curator Isabella Barkett present THE ECHO OF THE FEAST THAT CALLS ME, a double-screening of Hicham Gardaf's In Praise of Slowness (2023) and Izza Genini’s Aïta (1988) on the occasion of Milan Design Week 2024. Prioritizing film programming as an integral, critical methodology to decipher design’s social role, ADF defines a theoretical framework in the field, previously introducing the work of Yugantar Collective (India), Marta Rodríguez (Colombia) and Menelaos Karamaghiolis (Greece). For the premiere of In Praise of Slowness by Hicham Gardaf in Milan, Papanikolopoulos and Barkett engage in conversation with the Director. Gardaf enlarges the thresholds of architecture and urbanism through cinematic interrogation into the processes’ therein – providing a silhouette to visualize territorial and cultural transformations.
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Athens Design Forum and Isabella Barkett present ‘THE ECHO OF THE FEAST THAT CALLS ME’, a double-screening of Izza Genini’s Aïta (1988, 26’) and Hicham Gardaf’s In Praise of Slowness (2023, 17’).
Athens Design Forum’s 2023-24 season, ‘ANTHROPOS-TOPOS’, is guided by deciphering how humans coexist with places at the proxy of design, informed by the laboring body. The medium of film acts as a space for re-inscription – design principles are reunited with the sphere of personhood, identity, and collectivity. The film program’s theme for Milan Design Week 2024 bears its name from a line of Aïta (The echo of the feast that calls me), encapsulating the soundscapes of the Moussem of Moulay Abdallah and the peripheral sites of action that deeply inform and penetrate the ritual of gathering.
In the private realm, cheikhates (female traveling musicians) transform elements such as plastic water bottles into informal drums. They transgress and embody the symbolic significance of temporary tent architecture – built emblems that accompany their shared movement around the country. Genini ushers in the role of performance as a conduit to expand onto the public realm, a social role reserved solely in times of the cheikhate’s animation.
Gardaf’s In Praise of Slowness identifies the thresholds of design implications, expounded upon the body. The culture of the bleach sellers in Tangier, Morocco, is shared through a meditation on the morphology of the urban landscape. Space unfolds to witness time at the lapse of tradition. Through the peripheral coexistence of forms – sonic, bodily, and artifact – Gardaf explores the lasting demise of a capricious market.
Sonic landscapes form a central inquiry towards identifying social hierarchies of power — from the bleach seller’s occupation of public space through his laments, and Genini’s ritualistic approach to cheikhate’s collective call.
The aforementioned programming marks the first time the films will be shown in Milan. With extended gratitude to DOPO? Cultural Space @dopo.space and Clara Zevi.
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Athens Design Forum (ADF) presents the premiere of India-based Yugantar Collective’s filmography in Greece with a double screening of the restored Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali (Tobacco Embers, 1982) and Sudesha (1983). The films extend ADF’s 2023-2024 ANTHROPOS-TOPOS theme, deciphering how humans coexist with places at the proxy of design.
Tobacco Embers and Sudesha are resonant and emotive examples of how film deciphers the contours and shadows of women’s lives, revealing a potent image. Solidifying its position among the canon of ‘factory films,’ Tobacco Embers’ cinematographic emphasis on portals, doors, and gates alludes to the very structure of how systems of exploitation persist. Within both films, architecture, and landscapes of labor become signifiers of extractive, coercive, and penetrative conditions that inform women’s resistance. The films chronicle converging themes of labor practices in environments that span from a tobacco factory in Tobacco Embers to a Himalayan forest in Sudesha. Gendered connotations of labor are heightened and perforated as Yugantar Collective introduces a collaborative process of filmmaking that ensures the voices and actions of the female laborers still resonate today. Since their creation, the films have been screened throughout India in universities and female-led union spaces to harness temporal platforms of critical dialogues.
Tobacco Embers reveals the changing spatial orientations of Indian factories and how women laborers transform these industrial spaces into interiors of both refuge and refute. Porcelain plates and tea cups, byproducts of British colonialism and vestiges of the Indian caste system, infiltrate scenes of activistic rapport. Saris safeguard the protagonists when used as face coverings to exhume the harmful dust of tobacco. Woven basketry and large wooden planks extend the female body, adopting the rhythm of songs that consciously unify the women’s collective acts. The voices of the protagonists beckon a questioning of duty and morale, wherein ritual and alms of protection coexist with the dexterity of the trade. Pivoting from the visual weight of the tobacco industry to the collective gathering of the female workers within and outside their forced confinement proves a film of integrity, one whose perpetual intrigue serves as a catalyst for the power of being seen.
In Sudesha, a female village activist in the Chipko forest conservation movement is portrayed through the role of Sudesha Devi. Devi protests the changing ecology of the forest due to the introduction of imposing timber traders at the foothills of the Himalayas. With trees being used to make items such as tennis rackets, the film is a testimony to the impacts of colonial extraction for supply chains to native populations. As male partners left for work in distant territories, women led central roles in their communities. Viewers witness how the body becomes an integral instrument of labor that fuses the protagonist with the act itself – climbing trees, pounding wheat, sharpening knives, and collecting and carrying animal feed from regional plants. Unexpected uses of natural elements, such as a leaf transforming into a spout on a water spring, speak to the women’s relationship to the land and their quest to retain autonomy over their soil and customs.
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Athens Design Forum is pleased to present an inaugural collaboration with Shasha Movies, the independent streaming service for South-West Asian and North African cinema. Co-curating a selection of five films from the February program of Revolt Against the Sun, the following selection emphasizes contemporary Iraqi video art produced between 2017-2022. Revolt Against the Sun is a title borrowed from a collected book of poems by Iraqi modernist and feminist poet Nazik al-Malaika. She was a pioneer of free verse, radically departing from the classical rhyme form that had dominated Arabic poetry for centuries. In her spirit, Shasha Movies’ program of films include works that revolt against form, against structure, and against the sun.
Rooting our program within Athens, the screening will finish with the work of Cypriot artist Marina Xenofontos, Sunlight Vandalism, represented by Athens-based Hot Wheels Gallery. The film deciphers the history of a Kurdish woman’s relation to private and adopted spaces across her migration, revisiting the concept of home.
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Athens Design Forum presents a curation of films for Cinema Parentesi at BASE Milano, accompanying our 2023-24 theme ‘ANTHROPOS-TOPOS’, deciphering how humans and places coexist at the proxy of design. Mohamed Khan’s El Batikha (1972, Egypt) is followed by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s documentary Chircales (1966-71, Colombia). Athens Design Forum’s cross-cultural programming transforms these films into archives of labor practices that examine how design informs labor rights advocacy. The selection emphasizes a diverse spectrum of labor sharing a temporal framework: from an Egyptian office worker in Cairo to a Colombian family of brickmakers, we bear witness to the role of spatial landscapes both as agents of demise and ones capable of intrinsic power.
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Athens Design Forum is pleased to present a rare screening of Gloria Olivae (1987) by Greek filmmaker Menelaos Karamaghiolis. The upcoming ADF season will investigate global design cultures through images and film archives of labor processes, collectively placing the complex choreography of making into a new, human-centric dialogue.
As our inaugural screening debut, Gloria Olivae is testimony to the craft of man amidst the idolization and consequent exhaustion of fertile cultural landscapes. Featuring documentary coverage of shipbuilders, olive press laborers (amongst other craftsmen), while safeguarding folk songs of the island, the film was described by M. Papadopoulou of the newspaper “TA NEA” (November, 1987) as a “requiem for a disappearing Greece.” Gloria Olivae enforces a memory of place that further reflects the mirroring challenges of our current era – seeing design elements and the community surrounding built structure as protagonists in the transformation of our environments. -
Commissioned by Athens Design Forum to inaugurate the 2021 events – a portrait of a city engulfed in a mercurial fragrance with urban dichotomies.
EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS
The alphabet of our origin, built from the inaugural events in Athens extending to satellite curations.
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Athens Design Forum is pleased to present ROUTE-IN, a site-specific outdoor installation by Tbilisi-based Rooms Studio [est. 2007] commissioned for 5VIE Design Week. Hosted in the historic Milanese SIAM 1838 Courtyard, ROUTE-IN is a progression of Rooms Studio’s research into public space as a central axis of society.
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Athens Design Forum is pleased to present Phoenician Pigeons, a new collection amongst the first retrospective of Hollow Forms [est. 2016] by Palestinian designer Dima Srouji.
This collaboration spearheads Palestinian-Greek cultural relations through the inaugural showcase of their collective glass histories. Amplifying the agency and mobility of craftsmanship, Phoenician Pigeons is shared in conversation with the six-year retrospective of Hollow Forms, an initiative that envelops the transformative and diverse vocabulary of glass. Srouji approaches glass as a lens to decipher how archaeological sites and artifacts in Palestine are weaponized, becoming mediums for serial displacement and colonization.
Over the last year, Srouji has conducted research on the textures and forms of glass artifacts found along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. The richly dense marbled textures were historically produced from a mixture of coastal plant ash and ground seashells. Embodying the deep chromatic values of the Mediterranean, the contemporary marbled effects of Phoenician Pigeons are produced by the Twam family in Jaba’, a historic village between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
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Athens Design Forum & Les Ateliers Courbet are pleased to present an Online Viewing Room of Peter Speliopoulos’ CHTHONIC for 5VIE Design Week. Evoking a visual language strengthened by the primordial gods of the ancient Greek underworld, the symbolic pieces transform into archetypes of renewal and healing. Speliopoulos’ background in costume and fashion design instills a static and impenetrable material, stoneware pottery, with the grace and energy of a choreographed piece. Through the process of making, Speliopoulos disrupts notions of symmetry and a central axis to give form to “secret histories, antiquities and the passing of time.”
Thin slabs of ceramic, resembling the gesture of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, become appendages of organic and sprawling shapes adhered to the outer walls of the vessels. The layered surfaces composed of brush-applied slips and glazes are fired to create eroded, cracked landscapes. By referencing the geological formations of sand beds and earth fissures across Greece and Upstate New York, the tactile ruminations of the artist manifest the soil as a resilient medium for collective identity.
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…He found himself in Kea within the spring of 1967. A place still virginal, filled with history. With immediacy, he fell in love with the island’s Chora, ‘Ioulida’, for its picturesque and historical site. The locals embraced him and a friendship began amongst them after discussions on the commonplace, their habits, and their work – It was one of the few Cycladic islands with fertile stretches of land, livestock, and tanneries... even an enamel factory! It was self-sufficient. He liked that.
He bought a small house typical of Cycladic architecture – with rich curves dressed in white asbestos, a traditional roof, and with a vista of the Aegean from the small windows.
He would go there in the summers, upon his return from the rain-drenched Paris, so he may enjoy the Cycladic sun, which he loved...He would go there to paint, to cook the fish (of those he caught), to be a host to his friends and admirers who wanted to view him in the act of creation…at times painted works, at times functional objects, toys, sculptures, and anything else with the simplest of materials. He was continuously enthused by something within his ‘nest’; in this homely place, where, when tired and in need of a rest, he would lie down on the lithe, small bed with woven linens. He was humble, simple – in the same way as his spaces. Everything at once…from the furniture to the curtain rod…of his hand. His identity revealing itself everywhere. The grandeur of his creativity – the majesty – that leaves his personal mark to eternity. Translated from Greek by Katerina Papanikolopoulos; Original text by Mariza Fassianou.
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ADF’s 2021 inaugural programming shaped 12 events in 7 Athenian neighborhoods – broadening the international recognition of contemporary Athens through a cultural narrative axis.