FLAT DEVELOPED CONTAINERS | ATHENS 2008

About This Project

The form of the project usually takes that of installation on site. Materials are product packs and sizes varied. It was presented at the Ten Year after Friends exhibition at The Rolling Mills of Sarantopoulos, in Piraeus in March 2008, curated by Antonis Vathi.

Keywords and terms: forms of defamiliarization, mutation, recycling

The collection of packaging, from everyday products, and their diversion from modern objects of consumption and litter, diverted, sometimes, in totemic objects, and other times in reference to architectural spreads, and eventually in forms of defamiliarization or ostranie in everyday life, is an obsession that has begun to work artistically in my sense since a decade now, or so. The packages are objects designed by special order with the glamour to attract the buying public in consumption, a product that is thrown into the garbage immediately after its purchase. My other obsession is the recycling of a crafted art-object. In this phase of mutation of the project, I cover with a large number of pieces of my collection a surface of approximately 40 m2, for the needs of the Ten Year After Friends exhibition. In other phases of the project, the packages had turned into “magic” figures of the “Adventures of Alice in Wonderland”, or in totemic character figurines. The project evolves and mutates constantly, while the collection is growing. Athens, May 2010

Some thoughts

The material condemned to death

Parameters: 1. Recycling: a) cultural material as an unrecognized artistic work, destined to be thrown in the trash, (b) forms, through their transformation, or the recognition that they are “beings”, since these forms are perceived as abstract figures. 2. Repeating patterns. 3. a “other” form that emerges from the figures. A fantastic simulation of forms as caricatures of a world that “appears” in front of us, as soon as we put the glasses of creative imagination, which elevates things. That is, the objects above their apparent appearance. It animates them by giving them the right to exist beyond their purely material status. The status in which they are doomed to exist only as ephemeral, consumer products for throwing away. Therefore, the dialogue with the objects that surround us is possible through our transformative creative practice. It gives us a signal for these forms that are not life-empty, because they encompass actions that cannot be overlooked. The energy of condensed time around the creation of these forms. This elusive and transparent net of parameters that measure human creativity and life. It is the marriage of an old idea, that of animism and a newer of this post-industrial era and society. 4. They contain material, they are co-formulations. 5. This is a well thought out shot. 6. A poetic movement vs. of a revolutionary, regarding considerations that touch the grandiose, close to abstract concepts.