Sometimes what we feel nostalgic about is not the «beautiful days» of the past, but the desires and the dreams about the future that were born in the past but never materialized. We reminisce not about something which has passed, but a future that never came. Reminiscing the unrealizable is what inspires our current visions and desires.
Based on the above rationale, the Vakalo School organized the research project entitled «post-nostalgia: Design meets utopia», which ran for two years (from January 2017 through to December 2018) with the aim to conduct research and personal projects on the notion of Design as a material bearer of collective/individual memory and of critical utopian visions, with reference to the 1950-70 period and contemporary creative prac- tice. The programme «post-nostalgia: Design meets utopia» represents the first large-scale systematic research to be conducted in Greece on the theory and history of Design, and aims to demonstrate the indissoluble link between scientific study and creative artistic work, as well as the defining role played by Design in the life of people, in the social process and critical thought.

As shorty stated by the organisers “The participants’ projects are the outcome of research, theoretical study and applied experimentation that were developed in a broad range of various fields and topics: history and semiotics of Design, history of architecture, architectural utopias, history of popular and mass culture, artistic avant-gardes, surrealism, situationism, modern and post-modern typography, history of typefaces, politics of nostalgia and critiques of retro trends, psychology of memory, history of technology, philosophy of dress, history of the cinema, cybernetics and information theory, etc.”/
The seventeen participants, from the areas of architecture, visual communication, theatre design, visual arts, sound design and history/theory, were selected through an interview process following an open invitation. We pursued our research and development of our personal proposals supported by the mentoring of the coordinating committee, while we also collaborated systematically in the context of a programme of group meetings involving brain-storming and workshops with presentations of work-in-progress. What follows displays the work I produced through this process, as well as some side digital artworks that where produced throughout the years but not used in the end.
Despite the fact that the brief specifically requested that the outcomes produced were to be focusing on the applied arts of the years between 1950 and 1970 (architecture, graphic design, product design, fashion design, etc.) that were marked by futuristic visions and experimentation involving utopian explorations that reflected a general mood of optimism about the future of the modern world, I was allowed to focus and produce artwork inspired and referencing the decade of the 1990s. My interpretation had to be for that decade because of the reason that my personal nostalgia for that era (that I had never lived to experience since I was born in 1992) is immense. From the music culture, to the reknowned club culture, to the fashion and the aesthetics of that time overall, I have always lived under the shadow of a feeling of insuffieciency and deficit for not hav- ing experienced what was to live as youth in that specific era. In this project I made an epiclese greek word επίκληση, a personal child-ish hymn of nostalgia as a recall of never having experienced the joy of that time.
This nostalgia, An utterly escapistic, unbalanced, unrealistic, very idealised almost obsessive nostalgia that shaped into a project, and which came into a closure inside me, as the project also came to an end.
The oxymoron about the outcomes, is that despite my adoration and admiration for everything that had to do with the popular culture, the arts, the music and anything visual or music related that is connected to the period of the 90s, my outcomes overcame that aesthetic and were not referencing any elements from then -almost at all.
Reflecting back to the project I think that this had to to with me shaping , of me visualising a statement of state of feeling about that time, and some reactive aggressiveness of regret for not having experienced something I was so iger to have been part of from within.
The graphics I generated were dreamy, non figurative not referencing any specific era or information of any kind.
At the end of the day, the project post-nostalgia turned out to be my personal invocation to dreaming, to a revisit into a person’s juvenile aspiration.