We, The Unfamiliar

The project "We the Unfamiliar" is an investigation into the relationship between institutional architecture, the collective subject and artistic handcraft. It is articulated in five handcrafted panels (Paper Assemblages) and one poem: five emblematic buildings — symbols of Greece's political, economic and cultural reality — the Hellenic Parliament, the Bank of Greece, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) and the Ministry of Citizen Protection, are deconstructed and returned to their primordial, two-dimensional form as paper unfoldings, while the poem functions as their verbal core.

The project engages with the contemporary citizen's relationship to structural institutions, shifting the focus from the final form to the process of construction. By transforming the architectural model into an open-source conceptual game, artistic practice delegates the completion of the work to the viewer: the handcrafted process of cutting, folding and reassembling ceases to be a mere technical gesture and becomes a performative act of negotiation with collective memory, history and the notion of social unity.

All five artworks are available as A4 pdf and as three-dimensional models (.stl), so that every viewer can complete the work with their own hands.

The project was first presented in June 2024 at the performance festival PERASMATA (Passages), at the Bageion Hotel, Omonia Square, Athens. On the opening day, the artist invited visitors to complete the works alongside him over the course of several hours, transforming the inauguration into a collective act of construction and the audience into co-creators of the work.