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Time machine

I had been acquainted with Studio Metaplasi and its founders, Nikos Zouboulis
and Titsa Grekou, in a superficial manner. Whereas now, in view of the impressive work
evidenced in this book, I now realize how intense and significant Zouboulis, Grekou
and the Studio's presence have been in the field of figurative, applied and industrial
arts in Europe.
Before me and anybody else browsing through these pages are thirty years
of experience, visions, designs and utopias that do not simply recount one story
but multiple ones: the personal story of their authors, the story of Greek culture and art
from the 1970s, the previous century, to this day; the story of art, architecture
and design in Europe, especially in the nearest and my/our dearest of all European
countries, Italy.
Like a smooth sequence in which sources, creations, visions and designs glide along
"the primary and secondary roads" (to use the title of one of Paul Klee’s most
exemplary paintings) of the thirty-year long "cultural production" formulated on Europe’s
periphery by an artist/designer during the dark ages of the Greece’s military dictatorship
(1967-1974), Zouboulis always looked ahead. He explored the vast sea of artistic
thoughts, practices, stimuli and those examples that acted as foundation, conditioning
and determining his choices and their materialization.
On his own at first and then later after establishing his association with Grekou,
Zouboulis collected suggestions and thoughts that arose and emerged from space
and time: from the indispensable legacy of classical Greece to the world of decoration
of the 1920s and 30s (from Futurism created by Depero and co. between the two
World Wars to the refinements in European applied arts brought about by Art Deco);
from the disruptive display of performances in conceptual space to the production
of objects, environments and habitats.
And all this was collected, revealed and drawn in a visual-existential continuum that
breaks temporal limitations, eliminates the linearity of events and becomes a container,
a custodian, and a dynamic and vital depository. It was a Time Machine in which
the past, the present and the future coexist like a game of mirrors, reflections and light.
It was synchronicity that turned into flow, journey and memory.
Thus, in the performances of the 70s (when Nikos was only nineteen years old!)
the images of classical sculpture emerge, living and moving, recreated as if on the
stage of a Chinese shadow theatre. The forms and volumes are better and more
evocatively projected and delineated due to their being covered in latex. This material
hid the faces and bodies in order to transform them into something else, be that the
Winged Victory of Samothrace, floating on wind-blown veils, or the Caryatid Maidens,
draped in pleated gowns. But that is not all: in these three-dimensional phantoms
we also find variations of Baroque statuary that reconstructs in marble the subtlest
breath of arrested life at the very moment of transformation. But isn't this exactly
what is happening today with Momix and Cirque du Soleil before our very eyes? It is
exactly the feeling of an eternally present Time and the very existence of Memory
that was to lead – inevitably, I would say – Zouboulis and Grekou towards design,
designing things, landscapes and spaces where the protagonist is Man himself, laden
with stories and experiences.
This was a design that was to find its grammar in postmodern discourse, a particular
syntax, a language, which was to become a real object, perceptible by the senses,
the mind and the heart.
Nevertheless, this postmodernism looks at the past, the present and the future
in a vision in which everything coexists, intertwines and is transformed. It is a vision
which speaks, and what’s more, it speaks Italian.
From the "Futuristic Reconstruction of the Universe" by Fortunato Depero (with the
practical help of Rovereto's ateliers in Rome, Palermo and Milan) to the eccentric
and more-or-Iess industrial design created by some founding fathers such as Rogers,
Ponti, Albini and Mollino; from a "subversive" to a general atmosphere of rationalism
deployed as dogma – as by the “citationist” Caccia Dominioni, and the neo-libertarian
Gae Aulenti – to the playful explosion and conscious scoffing of Alchemy by Mendini
and of Memphis by Sottsass, Jr., following the abstract attacks driven by anti-design
and Radical in the 70s.