DESIGN OF THE PERIPHERY
Tributaries within film and photography at the intersection of critical discourse.
Founded by Katerina Papanikolopoulos in 2021, the non-profit Athens Design Forum (ADF) advocates for overlooked and generative design histories interwoven with global labor and migration patterns. Papanikolopoulos’ curatorial programming prioritizes photography and film as integral, critical methodologies to decipher design’s social role.
The medium of film and photography is foregrounded as a space for re-inscription, extending into the founding of our editorial featuring collaborations with Museo Casa Mollino, Luna Paiva, Yannis Drakoulidis, Francisco Canton, Javier Aravena Costa, and more.
On the occasion of the non-profit’s fourth anniversary in September 2025, Athens Design Forum announced the creation of Soil Epigraph, a private collection of anonymous photographs (1890-1980) foraged to exist in counterpoint to monolithic visual representations of Greece. Fragmented, dissonant imagery sourced in Athens is coalesced with a literary overture, forming architectures of reference that can be acknowledged as a whole. The archive gives voice to a country being built, exhumed by its own breath in the spatial weight of migration, infrastructure, war and conflict, the family unit, labor, and ecclesiastical foundations. Enacted through monthly releases, Soil Epigraph constructs latitudes to traverse spaces between presence and absence. Choreographing the unknown into an image of the wild cyclamen bending the soil and splitting an impenetrable bedrock – this is the essence of Soil Epigraph.
2021-25 Overview
ADF’s 2021 inaugural programming shaped 12 events in 7 Athenian neighborhoods – broadening the international recognition of contemporary Athens through a cultural narrative axis. In 2022, ADF launched international collaborations at Milan Design Week with ROUTE-IN by Tbilisi-based Rooms Studio and acted as a cultural partner of Collectible Fair, introducing a retrospective of Palestinian designer Dima Srouji in Brussels, Belgium. Establishing the theme of ‘ANTHROPOS-TOPOS’ from 2023-24, the core ethos was guided by deciphering how humans coexist with places at the proxy of design, informed by the laboring body.
For Milan Design Week 2023, ADF partnered with Cinema Parentesi, presenting the films Chircales (Colombia, Marta Rodriguez & Jorge Silva) and El Batikha (Egypt, Mohamed Khan) at BASE Milano. In Fall 2023, ADF premiered The Potent Image of Yugantar Collective, a double-screening and accompanying interview with director Deepa Dhanraj, shared for the first time in Greece, and published The Vithoulkas Archive, a prominent photographic archive of Greek furniture restoration from 1945-1970, enveloping three generations of craftsmen. In April 2024, Athens Design Forum co-curated with Isabella Barkett ‘THE ECHO OF THE FEAST THAT CALLS ME’, a double-screening of Izza Genini’s Aïta (1988, 26’) and Hicham Gardaf’s In Praise of Slowness (2023, 17’) for DOPO? in Milan, investigating sonic landscapes’ relation to space and the inhabitants therein. A feature interview in conversation with Gardaf, The Labyrinth of Sound, followed the screening.
The 2025 season was inaugurated with a double-screening of Mexican director Juan Pablo Gonzalez’s The Solitude of Memory and Caballerango hosted by the Cervantes Institute (Athens), accompanied by a feature interview, OF WOUND AND RESISTANCE. For Milan Design Week 2025, Athens Design Forum presented a screening of Tomka dhe shokët e tij (Tomka and His Friends) by director Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007), hosted by Dropcity Center for Architecture and Design. A feature interview–The Lantern of Berat, Xhanfise Keko–with Genc Permeti and Ilir Keko, accompanied the release. The film’s enduring language and intentional engagements with architectural discourse are embodied in Keko’s reflection: “It is no coincidence that resistance unfolds in the few places collectively owned by the city's inhabitants.”
ADF is featured in over 24 leading international and regional publications, among them Architectural Digest, e-flux, DOMUS, Wallpaper*, and Office Magazine.
