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.”

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“Drive out the imaginary and it returns at a gallop”

— Michel Butor from Inventory: Essays (1969)

Incantations of machinery, stilled in a photographic frame, summon an abstraction made sensible to the human eye. Produced within the governmental frameworks of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), Jet Lowe's photographs continually exceed the documentary mandate from which they emerge.

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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.”

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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“After death, time and chronology will be lost in a sphere of symbols.”
from El Hacedor (Dreamtigers), J. L. Borges

There 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. 

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“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. Athens Design Forum presents the archive of Georgian interior architect and designer, Eka Papamichail.

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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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“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.  

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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. 

This previously unseen archive is now digitized with the support of Athens Design Forum. 

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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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“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.

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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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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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