Katerína Papanikolopoulos

AthensDesign Forum

6 May

Written By Caroline Steffen

Katerína, please introduce yourself:

I have spent the first half of my youth as a researcher, writer, curator, and creative consultant with a background that spans architectural theory, design, performance, and editorial work.

With a core elemental foundation in performance and dance (Classical, Graham Technique), these past few years, I have displaced motion from my body to the arena of editorial manifestations. Focused on expanding an editorial language across new platforms, the founding of Athens Design Forum in 2021 engendered this new reality—photography features, film screenings, exhibitions, and archival research initiatives—for overlooked and generative design histories interwoven with global labor and migration patterns. My curatorial programming prioritizes photography and film as integral, critical methodologies to decipher design’s social role.
Literature, especially bilingual editions and translations, informs much of my thinking, as do the shifting earth seasons, music, scenography, and a lifelong fascination with the periphery as a central mode to be inverted, forming new tributaries of knowledge production. I believe in the centralization of phenomena, often not seen.

Self-portrait in Patmos, Greece

#1 How does your environment influence your work?

It is all-consuming. I am very receptive to those around me, and the air I breathe. I was born in Minneapolis, shaped in Los Angeles, and have been based in Athens for five years – soon to be in London for the Architectural Association (MA History and Critical Thinking in Architecture, with the luminary advisor of Marina Lathouri). Each place refined a concept of self within me. For, it was dance that originally brought me as an adult to Athens and Epidaurus, to work with a choreographer (while I was studying theater my first year of UCLA), then two years later to formally leave the U.S. and make the city a new home, bold with new ambitions.

What stayed constant was a love for found objects — a Moroccan berber brooch sourced at the age of twelve, the sensations of beads from different localities. I learnt to build a home from objects at an early age, out of necessity and a burning desire, and acceptance that my journey would take me to many unimaginable places.

My home is my studio, and I arrange it as a sort of landscape of intrigue. Over the years, I've learned to search and witness synchronicities: chance meetings, recurring symbols, repetitions. They’re what steer me, quietly but firmly, toward the next phase of my evolution.

The Skin of River Po, Carlo Mollino (with Fulvio Ferrari). Image © Andrés Altamirano for Athens Design Forum

#2 What role does space play in your practice — whether in terms of architecture, public space, or conceptual space?

John Ashbery’s poetry collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror has long been a guide for me:

“But what of the houses, standing ruined, desolate just now: Is this not also beautiful and wonderful? For where a mirage has once been, life must be.”

My mother, who studied architecture and later researched housing for displaced communities, taught me that structures carry emotional sediment. Coming from a refugee family in Cyprus, I grew up witnessing how the meaning of home is reconstructed. On the day I visited my mother’s former home in occupied Cyprus in late 2019, I saw a wedding gown hanging in what had once been our family living room — a moment that crystallized for me that architecture isn’t inert, it is breathing even if we no longer can bore our own children there. It is a disguised witness, it absorbs, it weeps with us in the signs of peeling paint, like serpent skin.

Space, in my practice, is never neutral; it is deeply spiritual, deeply political. There is no way to alienate this sensation from my practice.

A source of strength is our family’s long history in Cyprus as architectural stone masons and intaglio makers, with tales of escaping to France for apprenticeships in the early 1900’s. At a time when the vast majority of the community were agricultural workers, they manifested such soul-expanding work on the island in churches, and the little items we have left to bear the history of their existence.

From *The Vithoulkas Archive* © Athens Design Forum

#3 Can you tell us a bit about your academic background and how it has influenced your approach to design and curating?

In my own history, I began with an early love and discipline for performance — theater, voice, dance — before moving into comparative literature and philosophy at UCLA, and later Islamic Art and Architecture. The closeness of my highschool to the Walker Art Center was instrumental in decipehring a level of thinking I aspired to (Merce Cunningham: Common Time, 2017, for instance), and was elemental in the coordination of film, photography, installation, and printed matter that would follow me for the rest of my life. In a similar vein, the programming I had witnessed for Pacific Standard Time years later during my time at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was fundamental.

These sensations shaped the future collaborations of Athens Design Forum with designers and artists such as Rooms Studio, Dima Srouji, Luna Paiva, Georges Salameh, Yannis Drakoulidis, and more. Extending into our film curation tied to architectural discourse, the following central questions have been instrumental for the 2023-25 season: What does a horsewalker signify for a family in Jalisco, Mexico, as they experience the death of their son? (Juan Pablo Gonzalez’s Caballerango), how is a tobacco factory viewed as a threshold towards freedom for female laborers in India? (Yugantar Collective’s Tobacco Embers) And how can one quantify the weight of an occupation line for a group of young soccer players in Berat, Albania? (Xhanfise Keko’sTomka and His Friends – screened at Dropcity for MDW25).

My method is reliant on visual and philosophical stimuli – a lightning instinct into what will bring the audience closer to the motion of life that is usually hidden. Space as witness and active body, we explore this tension.

Tobacco Embers (1982, 26’) film stills. © Yugantar Collective

I love shadows, obscurity, things to be blurred or out-of-focus in imagery and our editorial, so the imagination can play discreetly. I also hold a large archive of rare books and anonymous photographs which encourage the editorial direction of our platform (the latter collection will be released as a new platform in Fall 2025). All to say we sought to form a core style and stature that is identifiable and yet strongly inimitable, aligned with our values.

A heart surgeon, I once had dinner with, recognized I must have a scientific background (somewhere deep inside), and it’s true: my gratitude always to my Piraeus-born father, a robotics engineer and professor, who entrusted in me the concept that to build great things, one must first have the vision, a relentless curiosity, and endless perseverance.

#4 What led you to founding Athens Design Forum, and what was your initial vision for it?

Background
My exposure to the contemporary design world was circuitous, parallel to my studies at UCLA — through work with galleries such as Blum (formerly Blum & Poe), acting as a Docent, Gallery Representative, and Liaison to Sales Director during Frieze LA Art Fair at the Neutra VDL House where I met global architects from Lebanon and Japan. Simultaneously, I held an editorial assistantship with LA-based Autre Magazine (founded by Summer Bowie and Oliver Kupper) and I had never encountered writing such as Bowie’s, and was truly inaugurated into the contemporary art world through this role, immersed in the photography of Graciela Iturbide, encounters with the archive of Carlo Mollino, performer Meredith Monk, and more. This experience engenderd in me a desire to seek a new lighthouse for the next years.

Impetus
I became increasingly aware of a desire to breathe a new space where experimental design thinking could coalesce without being reduced to commerce or spectacle. While working as a photographer’s agent for over two years, I realized there was a need for a platform that honored design's quieter strengths and more peripheral languages — the way architecture, art, and film could become engendered within one another. The foundations Art History provided, where I was trained to decipher global iterations of symbolisms always tied to the political-cultural movements the artifact encompasses, allowed Athens Design Forum to be born out of that instinct.

From Lament of the Absent Waters feature (Saida, Lebanon) © Georges Salameh

Result
It launched in 2021 with a week-long program of exhibitions, residencies, talks and book launches across seven neighborhoods and major institutions in Athens, launching a new methodology for design events that greatly supported the creative and cultural years to come in Greece. Imagine, it was the first time many of our journalists from major outlets had ever visited Greece – the core of the essence was also how to shape a timely representation of the city through quality reporting and articles that were generative and atmospheric.

Always grateful to Anna Caradeuc (who later founded Contributions Fair in Paris) and Julia Haney Montanez of the Design Release for their ongoing support. The best gift of founding ADF was the community it built across the world, a constellation in orbit.

The Evolution
At the core, following the initial week-long event, we migrated our programs to be yearlong, sustaining their identifiability and diversity. Our style was different, the photographs across editorial and our events emotive, charged, and symmetrical to what the industry was not accustomed to representing. I allowed our contributors full rein in the spirituality of their writing tied to architecture and design, (see: Lament of The Absent Waters with Georges Salameh or The Magazi by Yannis Drakoulidis), refraining from a clinical tone that is prevalent in outlets prioritizing commercial output. Over time, it evolved into a global platform, having collaborated with over 25 countries represented, and a deepened commitment to centering lesser-represented narratives and commissioning emerging global makers across the industries of film, architecture, design, and photography.

In 2025, we launched a new visual typographic identity by ECAL’s Dominik Bissem, aligning the website and brand with our ethos of 'centralization of a phenomenon' — ideas moving in concentric rings rather than strict hierarchies.

Rooms+Studio_5VIE_ph.MarcelloJuniorDino_9.jpg

Rooms Studio installation of ROUTE-IN (2022). Images © Marcello Junior Dino for Athens Design Forum

#5 What kinds of projects are you currently working on through Athens Design Forum, and what are your plans for its future?

I am focusing on photography and film as major axes of the platform’s evolution — continuing to explore design as a living anatomy. I view photography and film as imagined and pliant topographies across architecture and design. This year, we will center on Middle Eastern profiles extending all the way to South America for our online editorial. This coincides with our inaugural projects for 2025, with Mexican Director Juan Pablo Gonzalez, a commissioned essay with Fulvio Ferrari – director of Museo Carlo Mollino (Turin), a profile of Egyptian photographer Mariam El Gendy’s personal work, and our programming for MDW25 with Albanian Director Xhanfise Keko’s archive.

Athens Design Forum is a modular organism, and its future incarnation I hope to be as a formal center for architectural and design-based research, education, and exhibition — a place where peripheral histories can be amplified into major conversations with a conscious stylistic identity. And thereafter to open a publishing wing!

left: Aspesi editorial featuring Katerína Papanikolopoulos at Margaro, Piraeus © Chris Kontos of Kennedy Magazine, right: Original Poster for Athens Design Forum 2021, designed by Ukrainian artist Ivan Grabko

#6 How does your personal practice, Mati Grey, relate to your work with the Forum? Do the two influence each other?

MÁTI GREY is my independent consultancy — a way to expand the work we nurture within the non-profit into a broader, global context. It allows for a different kind of alchemy, shaping editorial strategies, curating photography, artist representation, and developing brand voices for clients that resonate with the same values. Additionally, we organize design itineraries throughout Athens for academia and professional enthusiasts.

My aesthetic instincts have always been singular. As a child in Cyprus, I spent long, solitary summers surrounded by my grandfather’s orchard, tracing unknown words onto invoice stock paper left over from his work. That process — of gathering, cataloguing, and encouraging disparate things into a personal archive underlines everything I do, from my consultancy work to the curatorial direction of Athens Design Forum.

Extensive travel and research across South America, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East have birthed sensations and inquiries of identity that have followed me relentlessly; and later formed the global outlook of the non-profit Athens Design Forum.

#7 How do you see the role of an architect in today’s society?

To comprehend the weaponization of architecture as a form of corruption, which is evident across the coastlines, island cultures, and Greek mainland (also crucially the same in Cyprus) – where hoteliers and developers devastate, clouded in ‘progressive sustainability’. I believe architects today must decipher new horizon lines — yet to remain strongly with the vernacular (the life-blood), with a longing for future application or iteration. Our association with place has been severed on many scales as the globalized ‘style’ has become an epidemic of form without feeling.

left: The opening of the Alekos Fassianos Kea Atelier, 2022 © Marco Arguello for Athens Design Forum | right: The Magazi, Editorial Feature, 2024 © Yannis Drakoulidis

#8 Three things inspiring you at the moment?

Teiresias by Giannis Ritsos — I’m consumed with the idea of a chorus shifting into a solitary figure, and back again. Every Sunday morning, I read bilingual editions of poetry or short essays with a view towards Piraeus, letting the elasticity between languages open new thought patterns.

Our family’s orchard in Cyprus — The sight of a swallow’s nest has always been a sign of home.
Jorge Luis Borges’ meditations on labyrinths, which shaped my early twenties, and his lesser-known association with the University of Crete.
The Blazing Sun (1954) by Youssef Chahine – with an incredible score by Fouad El Zahery.
And always, music — Bless the TR-909 drum machine.