Everything starts at home. In the late 1960s, at Kato Pefki, then a working-class area, there was built a villa, made of stone, surrounded by lawns. It had no fencing, on the American model. The design was by the well-known architect Sthenis Molfesis. The house situated at the edge (of a copse) was branded an "illegal construction" though of course it was equipped with a legal permit and all necessary documents; however, the related court cases are still in progress. The house differentiated me from the other kids in the neighbourhood and has stigmatised me ever since.
This bipolarity –out and in, legal and illegal, regular and irregular, private and public, good and evil- brought a gradual focus to my fragmented fantasy world. The absence of fencing created in my mind insecurity and a sense of permanent threat from the outside world; perhaps this was the starting point of my project series, some years later, of greenhouse interiors – spaces that are protected and absolutely controlled. I seek security obsessively, exploring the landscapes of the house: under tables, inside clothes, in the furniture. Concurrently, on my lonely wanderings around the outskirts of Athens the irregular reveals itself as regular. The metropolis is growing at a fast rate, it is an endless anticipation, an ongoing brand, a piece of a fragmented culture that combines need for a better life, lost identity, arbitrariness, absence of central planning: everything must be done quickly.
On the other side, a sterilised, conservative, excluded bourgeois regularity constantly changing hands, lacking in creativity even in the form of an arbitrary "patent". Everything for the future of our children, we can already see the future of our children. There, within these constructions, there arises the work of art, which looks like something but means nothing - merely that somewhere there chanced to be a house made of stone, with lawns and no fences, at the wrong time and the wrong place.
