2021-2025
archive
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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.”
Across five Mediterranean cities, Salameh traverses a lineage of cement throughout his first migration—fractured landscapes seen through near endings: corners, piers, edges, and trails of wetness marked by the plight of stilled movement. In sequence: ripe Sicilian figs are isolated in a black crate. Fishermen’s nets in Tyre, Lebanon, rest affixed to the wall, waiting for their owner. Five boys crouch over the pier’s bend, gazing toward their reward in Mytilene, Lesvos. A blue wooden stool found in an old café in Saida, Lebanon, reassures us that the veins of an impregnable sea continue to be found. The white chalk keeps score after a day of card games. With the subdued intensity of a pier, a broken lamp of aristocratic measure remains unlit in Piraeus, Greece. Drenched palms in Larnaca, Cyprus, are pressed downward following rainfall. One has found the desert’s water—a bright red sign, inconspicuous of location, closes the sequence. A shrine of the cistern.
A conversation follows with Athens Design Forum founder, Katerina Papanikolopoulos and Georges Salameh.
-
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.
-
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. Knots act as a foundation in place of an architect’s timber, as Armenian women concentrated their efforts in transforming lace into a mobile infrastructure. A device of agency – lace was to be carried, transported, worn, strong as armor. Both translucent and revealing, Armenian lace performed a play of the senses that allowed for a prestige bathed in mystical and healing qualities. In Armenian cultural heritage, lace transforms into an embodied and intergenerational art that ensures the longevity of a tactile language that is resistant and adaptive – at once as strong as the hands that shape a new inheritance of form.
Consolidating these observations to a global stage, janyak, Armenian needlelace, becomes a universe mastered by the scale of tension through curator Gassia Armenian’s Janyak: Armenian Art of Knots and Loops within the Fowler Museum (April 23, 2023 - April 7, 2024). Presenting fourteen of the late Marie Pilibossian’s needlelaces, the exhibition positions the role of Armenian women’s art as a prominent voice in the chorus of immigrant identity. Bearing witness, Gassia followed a holistic entry into the history of the lacemaker, tracing her very steps across Armenia and the United States. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Gassia’s grandmother is a genocide survivor from Gessaria (Kaiseri), sharing a symbolic association with the late Marie Pilibossian. The exhibition’s emphasis on the semiotic translation of motifs across needlelace is paramount, ushering in revived scholarship on a woman’s association with the natural world and the birthing of newly recognized motifs and symbols.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Shasha Movies x Athens Design Forum presented a selection from Revolt Against the Sun followed by a screening of Sunlight Vandalism by Marina Xenofontos
-
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.
-
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. -
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
“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. Glass is a beautiful example of how the land provides so much more than is perceived by us every day. The sand from our rivers was used to make glass, ash from particular bushes was used to color the glass, and mud was used to make mud bricks for the furnaces. The concept of dust to dust can also pertain to our architecture and our everyday objects if we were more generous with our earth.’ 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. Over the last few years, 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 were produced by the Twam family in Jaba’, a historic village between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
These photographic references serve as a reminder of both the circular process of glassmaking and the resilient prowess of the soil and its inhabitants.
-
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.
-
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.
-
…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.
-
Commissioned by Athens Design Forum to inaugurate the 2021 events – a portrait of a city engulfed in a mercurial fragrance with urban dichotomies.
-
ADF’s 2021 inaugural programming shaped 12 events in 7 Athenian neighborhoods – broadening the international recognition of contemporary Athens through a cultural narrative axis.