Fashion Week Usual

It's Mens' fashion week or fashion month or whatever. Nothing really new on the horizon, mostly it's unwearable clothes or last years fashion or just bad taste. Even Kim Jones showed a kind of boring sportswear collection where you can see stuff that you can get in H&M already (on sale!). As usual the only interesting ones are Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme and Raf Simmons. Finally a great double-breasted jacket from Dior as a follow up from last seasons' phantom of the opera looks but a little more subdued, and a cute cut off trenchcoat, maybe just as catwalk accesory but still a nice look.Raf worked the Suit and Sandals look

Neen Demo at SYNCH

So here's some photos from last nights' Neen Demo at Synch in Benaki Museum, curated by Angelo Plessas. It was a kind of perfect situation where people stayed for a long time lounging on the soft ruin concrete sofa pieces,
you could hear the faint guitar background sounds from Rafael Rozendaals' MisterNiceHands.com intersepted by the farting noises which made everybody laugh, Mai Ueda sang her "shower songs" in Greek, people threw Angelo's ballerina up in the air (ElasticEnthusiastic.com) and Miltos Manetas' ManInTheDark gave the usual Neen Mystery accident where his man in the dark started duplicating himself until the computer crashed. All this could not be possible without the super crew of the Synch Festival and the tons of super hardware from Multirama.
Pleople spent time on the pillows checking messages, taking photos, clicking and laughing and sleeping and it was all very neen indeed

Soft Ruin for a Neen Demo

This was my contribution to last nights' Neen Demo at Benaki museum in Athens. Angelo had asked me to make a kind of furniture/ instalation for the show, so people could hang out. Somehow I came up with the idea to make a soft building based on the iconic Le Corbusier domino frame that you find everywhere in Greece in a forever unfinished state as a kind of reverse ruin. I textture mapped a frame with not too much fake neen graffitti done in photoshop and then it collapses and becomes a kind of classical ruin, an 18th century romantic electronic bucolic soft concrete squat, always thinking back to Gufram, Group Memphis, Studio Alchimia, all the 60's italian avant-garde and somehow all this made perfect sense last night.

Some Recent Press

Angelo, Miltos and me are on the cover of EGG magazine with Neen Plateaux, our project for the Grand Promenade, which opens in 2 weeks in Athens. Inside they have a super nice article on Neen World and the projects that were born out of it such as P130, Cloud House, Superneen and Blue Wave, as well as several more pages on the Neenstars.

it's funny to see Neen World published so widely recently, considering it stopped existing in 2003 after the CASCO accident. Its almost becoming the Atlantis of the internet... Elena Skoula interviewed Angelo and me for a Greek newspaper. She even came up with terms of her own, and I think we might have a Neen journalist finally. This is a really cool interview/abstract confessional/free association of MM, AP and AA by Marina Fokidis in Lifo, one of my favorite free press magazines in Athens. Charlie Makkos took a realy cool portrait, and at last my vanity was satisfied. And finally an interview at Ozon Magazine byNatassa Papachristou, with another nice portrait by Charlie.

The New Black for Buildings

So even though the winning projects of this competition have been slowly surfacing in local media, and even though my proposal didnt even register in the first 20, somehow I'm still interested in this project and was happy to work on some additional photorealistic images. Photorealistic is sch a funny term and especially because my whole approach used to be to never ever produce this type of renderings, because I was always trying to make reality look like a computer image, especially in built projects likeTeleportDiner, Pause and Forever Laser. Recently I'm more and more into a kind of "Brutal Surrealism" as Memos Filippidis put it in the review of the New Trends exhibition. So anyway apart from doing more of these images, I thought maybe I'll try another material? Even though I'm knee deep into an exposed concrete fixation, I was curious to see what this apartment complex looked like if it was in white stripes...

or even a kind of classic red brick, which is such a generic material for new construction it's almost interesting and very scary indeed...and then I did a search for a leopard print, because I had a feeling that animal fur might be the new black for buildings, and what luck, I found a rainbow leopard print, so unexpectedly better even though Angelo looked over my shoulder and totally didnt go for it. So these images and many more became a kind of debate between a Brutalist Fantasy and a Flamboyant Reality, and what is building with exposed concrete formwork if not another texture map.

Lovett/Codagnone

Here's a quick look at the totally fabulous new book on Lovett/Codagnone who, apart from being tons of fun to be around, have been doing some fantastic work. The book is out on CHARTA and it covers 10 years of works, performances and photographs and includes some cool texts by Lia Gancitano and Octavio Zaya. Here's some of my favourite pics, including the great cover.

Napoli Est

While in Napoli I met Danilo Capasso who amongst other things is working with a group of people on rehabilitating a previously industrial area in East Naples. Their group is called N.EST and their idea is to start infiltrating the area with art rather than with commercial development. It's an interesting approach because we have seen so many of these areas around the world that go from "the new place to be" to "everybody is moving to" to "it used to be much cooler" to "I never go there anymore". Check out East Napoli while it's really hot

Greek Cuisine

While in Milan we stayed with our good friend Ilias Lefas who makes really fantastic handmade cabinet furniture. In the time of too much Ikea all over the place its really a great luxury to have these handmade pieces in your kitchen, plus its almost like cooking in a sketch!

Some more pics from Napoli

Banana Yoshimoto and the Queer Issue

I'm always lost in bookstores, looking for interesting fiction for the plane, but since I never really read book review I never know what to buy. This time I was browsing in Malpensa airport and I saw this book by Banana Yoshimoto. I thought if somebody is called Banana she MUST be interesting. The book was Hardboiled / Hard Luck, and simply amazing. Of course Banana turned out to be super famous with books translated all over the place. Her blend of metaphysical post xanax romantic bleakness was just perfect for the plane, and I suspect even better for the beach. What i would love to read too is this crop of new gay fiction that according to this article by my all-time favorite writer Edmund White is part of a big gay fiction renaissance.

The Seven Celestial Palaces

Yesterday I had a chance to see the Hangar Bicocca space in Milan, where Anselm Kiefer's "The Seven Celestial Palaces" are permanently installed. I had see drawings of the poject when it laucnched last year, but nothing could really describe this amazing space. The "palaces" are casts of container parts stacked precariously one on top of the other. So precariously in fact that the area is off-limits to people as the towering structures could really fall any minute.

Polygon Window

Recently I took part in a housing competition in Athens. My proposal was for a complex density that sits somewhere between a cluster of single family homes and an apartment building.

Post Padula

Padula was really great, especially the spooky forest where Fresco Bosco took place. Walking around at night you could see clouds of fireflies, and weird shadows from the installations on progress. Angelo's piece rocked: the Neen Emblems were installed along a huge wall facing the forest and they were imposing and funny at the same time.and we had tons of fun with Franko B and Alessandro and John of Lovett/Codagnone who did a great performance called Obliquities. Their soundtrack kept repeating "I recongnize that I'm not you, I made myself, I made myself what I am, I changed myself, I became someone else" over and over again, a totaly hypnotizing mantra that I can still hear...At the end of the night a gang of kids from the local town had gathered outside the monastery and brought an amazing over accesorized disco-car complete with huge sound system, light show and a homo-disco soundtrack that was just a perfect ending.