OF STONES AND THINGS OF ‘MENACING PERFECTION’

ELENA PARPA

Michael Anastassiades’s collection of stones, and possibly his relationship with design, begins with a grey, perfectly spherical rock. It was hand-picked and offered to him by Neoptolemos Michaelides (1920– 93). Anastassiades was in his early teens and the two were on their way back from a lookout for fossils, empty-handed, when Michaelides spot- ted the impeccably shaped stone. ‘You can’t beat nature’ was his remark, which Anastassiades now recalls.

A key representative of modern architecture in Cyprus, Michaelides was a passionate admirer of the island’s natural geological wonders. On his walks, he would bring back pieces of red jasper to decorate his garden, or shells, fossils, and other mineral curios to be carefully placed on shelves and cabinets. Cyprus is an ideal place for such investigative fieldwork: its geomorphology is impressively diverse, from the 90-million-year-old evidence of oceanic crust in the Troodos Mountains to the coarse alluvial fans of the Mesaoria Plain.3 Michaelides was guided by a deep-rooted belief that human design should originate in the natural environment. As such, his vision of modern architecture entailed a careful study of his locality, its specific climatic conditions, its topography, geomorphology, and vernacular architecture, which he believed to be ‘of the earth’.

Stones and minerals are of the earth. They are born of it, over an expanse of years, carrying the imprint of nature’s proportions and the markings of time. Throughout history stones have been elevated to ob- jects of adoration. In parts of Germany and Africa, people believed that the spirits of gods and ancestors resided in stones. In the world of Islam, sin presumably accumulated over the surface of al-Hajar al Aswad, turning this stone, the most revered object in Muslim faith, from pristine white to black.5 In Cyprus, there is ample evidence to suggest that aniconic stones were venerated in prehistory. A very particular, grey, ovoid stone not so different from the one offered to Anastassiades was found in a Neolithic village in the vicinity of present-day Morphou. Little is known of its meaning, but recent scholarship has linked it to other such stones found across the island, including a similarly shaped river stone discovered at the sanctuary of Ayia Irini, along with a crowd of terracotta warriors.7 Bearing traces of oil and the signs of fire, it is assumed that the lithic sphere was the sanctuary’s main cult object (un- til it was displaced).

Such findings speak of our ancient and intimate relationships with stones. They also point to the stone’s diachronic condition as nature’s cipher the site where all the secrets and knowledge of the uni- verse are kept and left encrypted. Hence their collectability as objects of nature’s mysterious perfection. In the case of Michaelides, however, this admiration was also conversant with the modernist impulse to trace the origins of human creativity back to the ‘pre-historic’, the folk- lore, and the natural. The diversity of objects he amassed and then displayed in his home remains evidential.8 Not only stones and shells, but also driftwood, archaic vessels, and folk artefacts coexist with African sculptures, Chinese artefacts, and paintings by his wife, Maria, and by others in his circle of friends. This accumulation of the marvellous, coupled with the exquisite architecture of the house, meant the place was especially intriguing for students of architecture and modernity alike, even before his death by accident in 1993. The architect was, however, notoriously private, and access was rarely granted. Having said this, here we have a prime example of a collection representing the self, a paradigm in keeping with some of the most emblematic modern figures,9 but also with the unexplained attraction we feel to- wards things, from man-made artefacts and commodities to natural objects, including stones.

‘Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so’. These are the words of Roger Caillois (1913–78), French philosopher, historian of science, and André Breton’s former friend, explaining our fascination with the wonders of the lithic world. Caillois loved stones and kept a large collection of them, which he later donated to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.11 He also wrote two books in which he combined prose with research to study the ‘menacing perfection’ of agates, dendrites, quartz, and ruin marbles. Caillois was of the belief that the stone, ‘an obvious achievement, yet one arrived at without invention, skill, industry, or anything that would make it a work in the human sense of the word, much less a work of art ... help[s] to give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture’. In Caillois’s world view, ‘the dark caves of amethyst’ or the ‘translucent depths of crystal’ contain valuable knowledge of the universe’s architecture, its special geometry and sense of proportion. And, expectedly, his texts encourage us to see stones as miniaturised versions of the cosmos, where one can discover links be- tween cell and galaxy, molecular arrangement and planetary system. His writing also confirms his interest in those practices which explore the ‘surprising resemblance that is at once improbable and natural’ between the structure of the world and its image as detected in stones. He turns, for example, to the case of Chinese poets and artists who collected slabs of marble or rock from riverbeds, mountains, and caves because of their likeness to landscapes in miniature. Named Chinese scholars’ rocks, these found natural objects represented a microcosm of the universe and were highly valued as aid for meditating on the vastness of nature from the confines of one’s studio.

Anastassiades invokes this tradition when interpreting Michaelides’s handling of stones. In his own writing, he describes the architect’s accumulation as ‘an act of adoption, “borrowing” a piece from nature and repositioning it, with exactly the same painstaking skill that ancient Chinese scholars had used before’. The art of displaying stones is now part of his practice, as is the act of collecting them. We witness this in the Anastassiades exhibition at NiMAC titled Things that Go Together. Here, selections from his collection are treated on an equal footing with the objects he has designed. Consider the decision to include the rare lingams in the main exhibition room. These are rocks of a phallic shape, found only in the Narmada River, in India, and revered as aniconic representations of the god Shiva. Placed on the floor of the exhibition space they form part of a syntax of ‘things that go together’, revealing that for Anastassiades’s design process the spatial display of objects is as important as any consideration of how they’re made. Further, the inclusion of found objects suggests that his practice (similar to the work of Michaelides) regards natural specimens as examples of time-less perfection and as evidence of the visual and cross-scale correspondences that exist between things an echo of Caillois.

Additionally, the exhibition at NiMAC shows the designer’s interest in creating homologies and associations between a diversity of objects as a method of working. This is seen in one of the rooms near to the entrance of the exhibition, which shows objects that have inspired Anastassiades over the years. These include a small plaster model of a column by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005), which he later used as a base for the fountain he designed for the London Fountain Company in 2018. There are other examples of such shifting relationships of scale the miniature is a leitmotif that runs throughout the show most prominently displayed in the room where the small-scale models of the string lights he designed for the company Flos are shown. Anastassiades’s series of pseudo suiseki is also a case to consider. Informed by the Japanese tradition which stems from the Chinese scholars’ rocks, these landscape stones similarly evoke entering deep meditative states. The first in the series, Jimbutsuseki (2014), depicts Mount Pentadaktylos in miniature. Literally meaning ‘five-fingered’, the mountain, according to legend, is the trace left on the soil by the hand of the mythic hero Digenis Akritas while he fought against the island’s enemies. As such, this landmark has come to signify courage, endurance, and perseverance, especially in the years following Cyprus’s division. Reduced to fit into the palm of a hand to become a jimbutsuseki (meaning, ‘stone similar to a part of the human body’), Anastassiades’s piece acknowledges the landscape context that inspired it and goes beyond it, too. The space and time of the miniature is that of the reverie, American poet Susan Stewart reminds us. ‘The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld’. Hence, ‘the miniature has the capacity to make its context remarkable’. In the miraculous world, a mountain sits in a hand, and a hand moulds the landscape into the shape of a mountain.

This inversion of scale in the body/nature relationship is made starkly clear in a gigantic stone sculpture, Pentadaktylos, by Cypriot artist Kostas Argyrou (1917–2001). The figure of Digenis Akritas is shown here standing magisterially, the five thick fingers of his right hand carrying the exact same shape of the five protrusions from the peak of Pentadaktylos mountain (or so we presume). Argyrou was a self-taught Cypriot artist who took up sculpture later in life. According to an anecdote repeated time and again in interviews he was inspired to become a sculptor when he worked at the Mazotos quarry in the late 1960s and stumbled across a bomb. Obliged to report the incident, he drove to the military camp in Larnaca, stationed next to the city’s archaeological museum. The objects he encountered at the museum captivated him, and the sculptures he began to produce immediately after- wards were inspired by what he observed in the display cabinets. This intimate relationship with the ancient archaeological artefact was commonplace with self-taught Cypriot artists of the time20 and is one of the aspects appreciated by Argyrou’s enthusiasts. His work was also valued for its spontaneity and non-naturalistic approach, its intense materiality and simplicity of form. Anastassiades happened to meet the sculptor an eccentric recluse through a friend and cites his visits to Argyrou’s workshop and home as influential. He was impressed by the artist’s animated universe of stone birds and animals, but most significantly by the crudeness of their making and the idiosyncratic sense of their proportions. Argyrou’s sculpture is stone worked and reworked. It speaks of a crisis in form and it challenges our perception of balanced harmony: figures with oversized limbs, faces with gigantic features, heroes as big as mountains.

Stewart also writes about the miniature’s counterpart: ‘The gigantic becomes an explanation for the environment, a figure on the interface between the natural and the human. Hence our words for the landscape are often projections of an enormous body upon it: the mouth of the river, the foot-hills, the fingers of the lake, the heart-lands, the elbow of the stream’. This is evident in the Greek language as well. We say ράχη του βουνού (the back of the mountain), χείλος του γκρεμού (the mouth of the cliff), or φρύδι (eyebrow) to describe a mountain ridge. To think of these analogies is, however, to acknowledge that space is man- aged by the principle of equivalence between body and nature. From Polykleitos’s Canon (ca. 450–440 BCE) to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1487) and Le Corbusier’s Modulor (1948), anthropometric proportion is what we have devised to measure (or create) the material world.

Proportion is a crucial aspect of Anastassiades’s design. His universe of objects is dependent on experimentations with basic geometric shapes (cylinders, cubes, polyhedrons, and, of course, spheres), which are used time and again to make shelves, vases, lights, mirrors. A consistent ode to Michaelides’s stone to the point of perfectionism’s obsessiveness his contemporary take on the Platonic belief of harmony is that the balanced coexistence of all elements makes up the whole. ‘My designs are never random’, he explains. ‘They always occur in relation to other things, since the defining element in the success or failure of an object is not its design nor its material. It is its proportions. The line between succeeding and failing is fine, almost imperceptible. I do not have a formula for tracing it. It is a matter of instinct. And the danger of disrupting the balance is always there’.

In his home in London, we sit to have dinner under an exemplar Mobile Chandelier from 2008. Its materials are eclectic: thin rods of patinated brass are combined with a set of mouth-blown opaline spheres. Yet the distinction of the chandelier’s design seems to depend more on that delicate relationship between each element alter the dimensions of any part and the particular harmonic correspondence might collapse; a symbiotic crisis just avoided with sleight of hand. Similar to Argyrou’s sculptures, there is, however, a sense of toying with hyperbole or letting things get out of scale: String Lights (2013) or Arrangements (2018), designed for Flos, seem like line drawings in space, with circles and rhombuses blown out of proportion.

To shift in scale is to shift in perspective, is it not? For his exhibition at Point Centre for Contemporary Art in 2014, Anastassiades scanned, copied, and magnified Michaelides’s gift. The stone was accompanied by its gigantic double, in which you could observe the original’s multiple imperfections perhaps you can beat nature after all? But there is more than revelation in his play with proportion. Alterations in scale are alterations in how we relate to things: ‘things’, here, meaning (just like the etymology of the word) an ‘accumulation’, a collecting of sorts, of matter, of substances, of particles that exist in relation and in time. Looking again at the exhibition at NiMAC, one gets the sense that this is the essence of design for Anastassiades. By compiling things to form liaisons and visual rhythms between shifting scales, the Paolozzi model becomes a fountain, the Michaelides stone becomes a light fixture or a shelf, the Cypriot landscape shrinks into a pseudo suiseki. Once more, Caillois returns: ‘The precondition of useful thought is that the world is finite. And, in a finite, teeming world, things are repeated and respond to each other. There are discernible cycles and symmetries, homologies and recurrences. Everything fits into one or several series. There is nothing that does not have its own counterpart or double, the cypher that recalls to our mind a certain premonition of it, or nostalgia for it’.

MADE YOU LOOK

ZOË RYAN

Michael Anastassiades’s lighting designs are always exquisite in their construction, refined in their form, but often there is something a little unsettling about them: a glass orb-shaped light bulb is perched precariously on the edge of a bronze base ready to fall. Would it bounce like a ball or smash into a thousand pieces? A giant glass globe punctuates the base of another lamp. Has this purposefully been made to stub one’s toe? Other lights resemble mobiles and require the perfect assemblage of forms and weights to keep them in equilibrium. Would a gust of wind tip them off balance? The answer is a resounding no to all of these questions, and yet one can’t help wondering.

Anastassiades understands that objects play a critical role in daily life, defining our interactions and understanding of the world. The tension between the juxtaposition of materials, the compositions of forms, the technical requirements, and the theoretical underpinnings of a work are the primary elements that have come to define his 25-year practice. As their titles suggest, from his early designs, such as the Mes- sage Cup (1994) to his collaborative projects such as Weeds, Aliens and Other Stories (1994–98), to more recent lighting projects such as Tip of the Tongue (2013) and the Happy Together series (2015), Anastassiades delights in probing the psychological implications inherent in how we use and live with objects. These ideas defined his early works and continue to provide a narrative thread throughout his practice.

Anastassiades trained first as a civil engineer at Imperial College, before switching to industrial design at the Royal College of Art, both in London. This hybrid education has grounded him in both the technical and the theoretical foundations of a project, concepts that he continues to negotiate with equal fervour. His designs are marked by their simplicity, yet they belie the complex engineering that makes them possible. Message Cup exemplifies this approach. Handmade from ply- wood and polystyrene, when the cup is the correct way up, a message can be recorded by speaking into it. Inverting the cup stores the message (which is recorded on an electronic device concealed in the base), which can be replayed if the cup is turned back the right way. A precursor to the handheld recording devices on our smartphones, for example, through which we can share messages, this early design aims to make the process more personal, connecting with the daily ritual of drinking coffee inherent in his Greek-Cypriot upbringing: ‘Let me drink from your cup; I’ll learn all your secrets’, he quips, reciting a common saying from his childhood.

This project and Anastassiades’s intention to make technology more personal and intimate caught the eye of designers Anthony Dunne, who was teaching at the RCA at this time, and Fiona Raby. They, like Anastassiades, were frustrated with how narrow they felt the field of design had become: ‘We wondered where all the radical ideas that had permeated the design world, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, had gone’, Anastassiades recalls. Driven by a do-it-yourself pragmatism that has guided their practices ever since, they began to collaborate on projects such as Weeds, Aliens and Other Stories. This collection of ‘psychological furniture’ grew out of a frustration with the lack of furniture available to meet a wider range of human psychological needs. The objects bring to material reality the unspoken and seemingly irrational relationships people cultivate with their own plants and gardens. For example, the Garden Horn (1994) makes explicit the common yet often unremarkable behaviour of speaking to one’s plants, providing a specific channel for a more direct relationship between person and garden. The Rustling Branch (1994) creates an auditory alternative to a vase, both acknowledging and translating the way visual reminders of nature can transform a human-oriented space. Working together on all aspects of these projects, Anastassiades sharpened his knowledge of technology, in this case electronics. Yet technology has never been the source of expression in his work. It is instead employed in the service of the conceptual foundations of a design.

Since establishing his own studio in 1994, Anastassiades has continued to develop collaborations with designers, architects, and artists, including other critical design projects. Since 2007, due to his interest in industrial production, he has also been committed to establishing his own brand in which designs for lighting have taken precedence. All the while, though, he has remained dedicated to exploring the emotional, as well as intellectual, capacity of design. The Anti-Social Light and the Social Light (both 2001) are a case in point. These lights are dependent on interaction and user behaviour. The Anti-Social Light only works when there is complete silence; as Anastassiades noted at the time, this light is about ‘respect for what the object needs and what it demands... In an abstract way, it is almost like a companion that behaves a certain way in the house’. However, its nemesis, the Social Light, works in exactly the opposite way, only glowing when people are talking. Anastassiades initially developed these projects as an experiment for his own home, and since then he has continued to develop a range of projects through which he probes the relationship between form and function, object and user. Another example, Shooting Star (2014), is a light in the form of a globe that appears to be sliding down a wooden beam, angled against the wall. The tension in this work is derived from the form, shape, angle, and composition of the work, in addition to the seeming fragility of the glass light source, which gives the impression of movement, but is in fact fixed in place. This piece was created to communicate the economic uncertainty present at the time in his native country of Cyprus, following the financial crisis in 2013. This work and others like it are exquisite in their construction, emphasising Anastassiades’s hands-on approach to production, which benefits from his engineering background in its precision.

Anastassiades’s independent way of working and his interest in challenging how we understand the landscape of objects that defines our quotidian experiences are emphasised in his 2019 survey exhibition at NiMAC. A reflection on more than a quarter of a decade of production and experimentation, the exhibition takes each work as a case study. Projects are displayed discretely from one another to emphasise their singularity and, in turn, his approach, steadily building his practice one work and one collection at a time, adding to his portfolio with deliberate intention, with ‘things that go together’. Like modern designers in the 20th century, such as Cuban-born Clara Porset, who believed ‘there is design in everything’ and called for a close examination of the world around us, Anastassiades also draws inspiration from across our natural and manmade environments. As well as his own designs, his exhibition is punctuated with examples of his vast collection of rocks and stones found on his travels across the world. And like his own designs, their beauty is found in their difference: a well-polished surface, an interesting shape, a unique pattern.

What his exhibition also shows is Anastassiades’s interest in material explorations. He is particularly drawn to the sculptural and functional qualities of bronze; mirrored glass is another favourite. Both materials are highly reflective, which enhances their relationship with the space around them and encourages users to move in close to really understand their clean lines and silhouettes. Drawn from a menu of primary shapes, his designs subtly recall the exquisite compositions of modernists such as the German designer Marianne Brandt and the geometries of projects such as her Coffee and Tea Set from 1924, which she made while at the Bauhaus. Indebted to such predecessors who championed an interdisciplinary approach to practice, working across typologies and scales, Anastassiades adapts his methods to create furniture, lighting, and product designs that rely on methods of industrial production. And yet his meticulously resolved formal language, his choice of materials, and the exquisite manufacture of his output is resolutely his own and of our time. What isn’t shown in the exhibition is Anastassiades’s rigorous making process. His studio is crowded with models and prototypes at a range of scales, from which he and his team can determine the geometries of a design, test out proportions, develop construction methods, and make suggestions as to the ultimate material solutions. His judicious method of hand-constructing models in his studio is both instructive and advantageous in contributing unique responses to our object landscape that are ultimately made in series using industrial methods. Yet that doesn’t mean he avoids experimentation with new materials and production techniques far from it. Rather than being led by technology, he uses it in the service of qualitatively different objects that go beyond previously realised designs. As the theorist Richard Sennett suggests: ‘The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine’s potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command’. Anastassiades provides an independent language for his projects by working backwards and forwards with both hand and machine.

What is clear, however, is Anastassiades’s ability to flex the technological muscle of his projects while ensuring at the same time that his designs are intuitive to use. Drawing on his background in engineering and through intensive and rigorous processes of investigation he finds the most appropriate technologies that will enable him to achieve his designs. His process, however, is often far from intuitive. Acutely aware of what’s possible, he regularly distances himself from his knowledge and training in order to open his mind to new possibilities and what ifs, as a way to push his designs further and to try and do more with technology. Often the process of creating his work takes years as he negotiates between the constraints of a project and the possibilities of his designs. For Anastassiades, it is the balance of the formal, functional, theoretical, and technological qualities of a project that are needed in order to stay true to the essence of his original idea, concepts that have driven the production of well-made designs throughout history.

This methodology is key to projects such as String Lights (2013) and Arrangements (2017), made for the Italian lighting company Flos. These deceptively simple designs took years of research and development to get the hanging methods, the connection between the elements, and the engineering to appear effortless. Yet they also showcase his ability to realise families of objects, made in series for mass production, in addition to works made in limited numbers. Founded on a lyrical repetition of forms, these collections take cues from designers such as Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, who famously worked for Flos in the second half of the 20th century to create work with a similar playful quality. The Castiglioni brothers consistently interrogated issues of mass production and sourced ideas for their work from everyday objects, as in the Toio lamp from 1962, for example, which uses a 300-watt car head-lamp as a light source on a base made from parts of a fishing rod secured to a metal cleat for stability. Design in this context was not only understood as a tool for solving problems, but as a mode of creative expression that can illuminate our daily interactions and help us relate to the world around us. The hoop-like lights of Anastassiades’s Arrangements hang in space like acrobatic rings awaiting use in a circus. Their poetry of form relies on their exquisite construction. When hung in pairs or clusters, they rely on one another to both function and complete a composition.

Such projects have come to define Anastassiades’s work, punctuated with special commissions that allow him the opportunity to rethink other typologies of objects and how we use them. The fluted bronze column of the Fleet water fountain (2018), for example, topped with a shallow bowl, gives no clues as to how it works. Only by interacting with it does one understand it is sensor-activated, responsive to presence rather than touch, fitting for a public amenity. The same idea is at the heart of the Beosound Edge speaker, from 2018, made for Bang & Olufsen, a playful design that looks like a giant coin resting on its side. When rolled forward, the volume increases and when rolled back, it decreases. You understand that complex technology is involved in such a design, but its technological flair is a medium to encourage user inter- action, rather than a form of visual expression.

As these projects suggest, no matter the object, Anastassiades’s approach remains the same. Although he works with an inclination to pare down the lines and forms of his work to their fundamental characteristics, what you see is not always exactly what you get. With a keen sense for bringing innovative solutions to the task of designing everyday objects, Anastassiades thrives on determining the personality of an object beyond its formal or functional equations and in turn re-examines how an object should look and function. Aware of the philosophy of objects and spaces, Anastassiades demands users reconcile their own preconceptions and prior experiences of design with the carefully controlled output he creates. His work makes you look...and think.

SCALE + SEQUENCE = CHOREOGRAPHY

EMILY KING

Practical furniture has to relate to the size of the human body. A chair must allow for hip width and leg length, a table for the tally of a torso, and so on. Meanwhile, lighting has no such restrictions. Hence ceiling lights that appear to have aspirations towards the UFO and chandeliers akin to formations of synchronised swimmers. It is a metier with latitude. Michael Anastassiades, however, ignores this licence to scale. Instead, in his work with lights, he chooses to operate within a relatively restricted range. The branches of his structures tend towards the dimensions of limbs, and their bulbs mostly sit within the bounds of a small child’s fist, or up to a whole head. At full stretch, even his largest work remains comparable to the size of a human body. These designs don’t dwarf the people who live with them; they aren’t monsters that make everything and everyone shrink away. Rather, they are objects that you might find yourself imbuing with human qualities.

The essential unit of the work is the metre. The vast majority of people fall between one and two metres in height, and a metre is also the length of the most generic of light bulbs. In 2011 Anastassiades designed a collection titled Lit Lines, a series of multi-branched floor and ceiling lights based on these standard bulbs. The collection was inspired by travels to India, where metre-long neons are strung casually across market stalls, on buildings, and even in trees, creating a night-time scatter of bright dashes. Anastassiades was particularly drawn to the spontaneity of these handmade arrangements, with each bulb meeting a specific illuminative need. In daylight the bulbs look clumsy with their plastic casings, heavy metal brackets, and improvised suspension, but at night these features disappear and the effect is magical. The bulbs appear like the fleeting ticks of an outsize neon pen.

The metre is also the basic unit of One Well-Known Sequence, a collection of lights designed in 2017. Launched in the Michael Anastassiades studio, a recently decommissioned garage in Camden, the Sequence consists of 11 combinations of standard linear incandescent bulbs, either one or half a metre long, and tubular brass fittings of the same diameter. The designs evolve as a parallel repetition of rods, either in metal or illuminated. Bulb and fitting sit side by side in all the lights, abutting vertically in the case of the floor and pendant lights, stacked horizontally in the table pieces. In Anastassiades’s mind, the collection has a very particular relationship to the building. Having bought the old garage only months before the lights’ debut, and being about to embark on the process of its renovation, the discussion of square metreage had come to the fore. In developing the lights, he was taking the measure of his new space.

The sense of series evident in One Well-Known Sequence is common across the work of Anastassiades. His collections tend to be variations on a theme rather than groups of singular pieces. Working in multiple, he pursues ideas with a completist’s obsessiveness, yet he is ruthless in the edit and only allows a very small proportion of his designs to go into production. While the process is quasi-systematic, the final cut is made on purely aesthetic grounds. In the case of One Well-Known Sequence, for example, the 11 arrangements that went on to become editioned lights were chosen for their apparent effortlessness. The collection might suggest the outcome of a mathematical sequence, but that is not the case, and instead it relates to a much looser understanding of a progression. An analogy might be to the pragmatic pattern of traffic lights, which, in the UK at least, run red, red/yellow, green, yellow, red. Sequences of this improvised kind are also the basis of the White Porce lain Series, designed in 2017. The small rounded porcelain block holding the globe bulb of light D1 extends out from the wall to become three times the length of light D2 and then appears to flip up vertically against the wall, the curved edge remaining outermost, to become D3. In a related range, numbered O1 to O3, the circumference of the bulb grows in relation to the shortening of its white porcelain support. It appears there is some kind of game in play, that there are rules, but in fact the only determining factor is the designer’s sensibility. Likewise, the various manoeuvres of the Brass Architectural Collection, the spherical glass bulbs which start at 80mm in diameter, expand through 150 and 250, and all the way to 350mm. The spectrum of relationships between bulb and support might suggest a method, but, again, the only underpinning factor is a rigorous aesthetic.

Not only deploying the dynamic of the sequence for his work in lighting, Anastassiades mines the conceit across his output. Attracted to the Japanese tradition of suiseki, or ‘water rocks’ stones that are treasured for their resemblance to miniaturised landscapes he was inspired to create such things from scratch. Rather than opting for a single model, he made a series derived from Italy’s three active volcanos Vesuvius, Vulcano, and Stromboli all in the central Italian laval stone Basaltina. The outlines of the contoured stones were determined by accurate digital mapping, but the height of each is exaggerated twofold. Foregoing the objective truth, they favour the appearance of the volcanoes from their respective bases. In Japanese tradition there is an indissoluble relationship between the suiseki and their two-dimensional representation in prints, paintings, and drawings. Across three iterations, the Basaltina models are both object and image.

Just over a decade ago, Michael designed the first of his Mobile Chandeliers, numbers one to five. The height of the tallest is 1.66m and the stretch of the widest 1.63m. Because of their proportions and their prescribed set of attitudes, they are suggestive of a set of physical movements. They could be the brass and bulb equivalent of the five basic ballet positions. The Mobile Chandelier collection now runs to a set of 16, each new iteration being an extrapolation of the last. While the straight lines and angles of the first five might give the impression of static positions, the curves that were introduced in the second set, and expanded on in subsequent sets, create a sense of dynamism. Inject a feeling of movement into something of human scale and you arrive at a form of choreography.

There is no single convention for choreographic notation, but among the best-known historical examples is that promoted in the 1680s in the court of the French king Louis XIV by his maître de danse Raoul-Auger Feuillet. Published in the book Chorégraphie (1700), this system indicates the position of the arms and legs, the direction of their movement, and the ornamental flourishes they make on the way from one attitude to the next. Transcribing a whole dance, the notation becomes very dense, but if you isolate single movements from the page, the form is strikingly close to that of the most recent of the mobile designs. Extending the analogy, as more chandeliers are added the dance continues, each step building on the former.

Several of Anastassiades’s serial lights appear in his exhibition Things that Go Together. Hung in the large former industrial hall of Nicosia’s Municipal Arts Centre, they are in proximity to their fellows from the same sequence but are close enough to strike up relationships with designs from parallel collections, both lighting and other kinds of objects. The overall effect is one of animation, sets of interconnected choreographies combining to create a new dance. Viewers weaving their own way through the installation add yet another layer of movement. By virtue of the human scale and the idiosyncratic sequence, there is a sense of theatricality. Rather than simply sitting there, these pieces perform.

UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOURS: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES

ALESSANDRO RABOTTINI

Alessandro Rabottini: When I finally visited your exhibition in Cyprus, the title that you chose, Things that Go Together, made immediate sense to me: pieces of furniture, objects, and non-functional creations were literally sitting next to each other, and the whole experience was very immersive. This is something that we take for granted when it comes to art exhibitions, but much less so when we look at how design is displayed: starting from the early 1960s, in fact, and especially with minimalism, artists took their sculptures off the plinth and put them directly on the floor, creating a very physical relationship between the viewer and the space. It is a paradox that in design exhibitions is actually the other way around: you take an object that you would usually use every day and put it on a plinth, framing it and distancing it from its existence in the world.

Michael Anastassiades: That is exactly the reason why I took away the plinths, because for me these are products, everyday objects to be used. It is about being able to come close to the objects and accessing them for what they really are, rather than elevating them to become something that they shouldn’t really be. I wanted to remove the added value that is implicit in the pedestal and let the viewer interact with the objects in different ways, standing above them, looking at them all around, in different settings and from different heights, rather than having a very controlled view, because that’s how you experience real products in real life.

AR: You also installed the pieces in relation to each other, by creating a micro-constellation of objects within a larger orchestration of things, so that we can navigate the exhibition not only through the sequence of rooms but also through conceptual and formal clusters. There is no distinction or hierarchy between functional objects and purely conceptual experimentations, between product design and artistic output.

MA: Although every object in the show is carefully positioned where it needs to be, I also wanted to allow the perception of things happening accidentally. We all experience products every day through different lenses and in different contexts, and one can be surprised when unexpected associations between things happen. When you position an object next to another, you let that object get away from its perceived function and you let it perform a different life.

AR: Like telling a story, in a way.

MA: I have always been very interested in building a relationship with an object that goes beyond its function, a more psychological relationship, a level of discovery that almost deepens a form of dependency with that object. And this is something that I have explored not only and more evidently with the initial ‘conceptual’ works that I did in the mid-1990s but also with the more ‘functional’ products that came after, trying to expand the way we define an object and its obvious performance. If you take, for example, the Anti-Social Light (2001), it responds to the environment in a very specific way: it operates as a normal light with the difference that it only glows when there’s absolute silence, so it does not allow you to talk around it. At the time, that was a way for me to highlight the relationship that we can develop with products beyond their perceived function, and later on I started asking myself how, as a product designer, I could explore and respect the behaviour of an object.

AR: This makes me think of Andrea Branzi’s theoretical approach to design and the way he has been advocating for an anthropological understanding of our relationship with objects for decades now. Through his extensive production of essays, he has been tracing a history of objects that is above all a history of the relationship that we, as human beings, establish with objects. This relationship goes way beyond what you define as ‘perceived function’ and views objects more as vehicles for a deeper understanding of our existence in the world, objects that don’t exist as mere ‘tools’ but that are charged with imagination and affection.

MA: I see it as a psychological interdependence that we have with objects that goes beyond a functional dependence. Traditionally, designers are supposed to respond through their products to a specific need and purpose, but I think that it is interesting to look at a lateral side of things and to bring these suggestions into the product, whether they are consciously being incorporated in the process or not. There is a complexity that exists in the world around the product which is fascinating and that can infiltrate its function and enrich it.

AR: During your formative years, this concern for the psychological value of objects of daily use led to radical experimentations. How did this translate into your practice when you started working as a product designer?

MA: When I design, I try to conceive products with as many layers as possible, with the hope that also just one of those layers will speak to someone and it will of course speak very differently to you and to somebody else because, as humans, we are all different. Through the years, I have worked very consciously with this idea of adding layers of complexity, making people think that an object can function beyond its expected behaviour, and now this process happens to me almost spontaneously. When in 1994 I did Message Cup, the idea was to twist its expected performance into another dimension, by turning a cup into a communication tool. But at the same time speech comes from the mouth, and you drink with it; words come from a place where we take in food. All these initial metaphors and associations became part of my work- ing process, and now they are an almost subconscious part of it, in the way they get externalised even when I design ‘normal’ products.

AR: And would you say that your initial experience in limited edition design with the establishment of your own company in 1994 helped you to nurture this creative and experimental complexity and bring it into the field of product design?

MA: There is an element of truth in what you say, but I believe the ultimate challenge is to conceive industrial products that retain the same sense of excitement and surprise that you would find in an experimental project. At the beginning of my career, limited edition design was purely a matter of economics: I wanted to express my language in a certain way, despite the fact that I was not an established designer. Some projects remained as unique pieces, while in some cases they were slightly more successful and I would produce a handful of them. But in general the way of producing those objects ended up being quite expensive, so the audience that could actually purchase them was limited. So my experience with limited edition design is purely based on economics, even if at times it still enables me to realise certain ideas with a degree of freedom. But, to be honest, I am not a believer in limited edition pieces per se.

AR: I think you made this point very clear in the show by eliminating any distinction whatsoever between limited edition and industrial design, but also between functional and non-functional creations. But if you had to think of one product that marked the moment when you were able to take the conceptual investigation of your formative years and carry it into industrial design, which would it be?

MA: That moment came when I had the opportunity to produce something on an industrial scale for the first time, so that would be my first collaboration with Flos, with String Lights in 2013, which conceptually marked a new way of looking at lighting.

AR: When I first saw String Lights I still didn’t know you personally and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is bringing site-specificity into industrially produced lighting!’ Because, of course, coming from an art background myself, that lighting system immediately made me think of Fred Sandback’s minimalist installations of elastic cords that he started making towards the end of the 1960s, which was a way to create space almost out of nothing. In a text that he wrote in 1986 about his initial output 20 years before he said, ‘The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid a 2x4 inch-lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it’.1

MA: Precisely, defining space in the most invisible way. Even though, I must say, Sandback’s work hasn’t been a direct reference for me; I was more interested in light as a form of definition of space.

AR: I think that, once again, referring to minimalism as an artistic movement is very pertinent here, if we also consider collections such as One Well-Known Sequence (2015–17), Lit Lines (2011), Tube Wall Light (2006), and Tube Chandelier (2006), together with your most recent presentation with Flos at Euroluce 2019. And I am not just thinking here of the obvious reference to Dan Flavin’s neon works, but, more deeply, I am thinking of your recurrent use of one module as a repeated element within a rhythmical structure, and of the use of bare materials and technologies often exposed in their structural essence. Both these formal and conceptual strategies are essential to minimalism and its investigation of space.

MA: At the beginning of my career as a lighting designer, normal bulbs were still around, so what defined my language was very much what was available at that time. It was fascinating to look at those bulbs that have been manufactured in the same way for over 50 years and to understand how to use them in a different way. Since the bulbs came in many sizes, they quickly became for me a unit of measurement, a way to explore the space. I decided to focus on the one-metre linear bulb as a form to interact with space.

Art is, of course, a big part of my life and I have always been aware of certain references, but they never became explicit in my work. Consciously or not, you absorb information and filter it through your own personal experience, and when you finally formalise your ideas, those references may have changed inside you. That’s why it was so interesting for me to transition my ideas into String Lights, because it allowed me to extend into industrial production and into architecture what I was already exploring with my own brand. The obsession of interacting with the space and measuring it was there, but now I could insert an element of improvisation via the string, which has always been traditionally used as a tool to measure and draw in three dimensions.

AR: With this idea in mind of designing lights in order to create a space, do you see architecture as a possible expansion of your work in the future?

MA: Not directly, and I have no immediate desire to move into that. I like references to architecture coming indirectly through the objects that I design. I very much believe that light defines space way beyond functionality and decoration. If you look at Southern cultures more so than Northern cultures, you see the extent to which lives are starkly defined by light. Light has more to do with architecture than its actual definition explains.

AR: In a certain way, many furniture pieces that you have designed also tend to define a space. The bookcase system Jack that you designed for B&B Italia in 2018 belongs to the tradition of shelving systems that can also become partition walls, and the Rochester sofa that you conceived for SCP in 2015 is an enclosed unit that isolates people from their surroundings. For Dansk Møbelkunst, you recently created a group of furniture that includes a dividing screen. I understand what you mean when you say that you don’t feel the need to create physical walls; it seems that you have a softer approach to the definition of space, as if you want to create spaces that can be literally switched on and off.

MA: I prefer suggesting a space rather than actually designing it as such. Furniture and lighting and even objects allow for many possibilities and scenarios to co-exist, whereas architecture tends to be more defining.

AR: What you are saying brings me back to what you were mentioning before about your desire to ‘respect the behaviour of an object’, and ‘respect’ is a word that recurs more than once in a text you wrote about the impact that the Cypriot architect Neoptolemos Michaelides had on your youth: respect for the environment when it comes to building a house, respect for a natural or archaeological finding when it is repositioned from its original context to a different one, and even respect for daylight and darkness ‘There is a reason why there’s the night and there’s the day, and we should not try to turn one into the other’ a distinction that you say may be the reason you became a designer of lights. It seems that this concept of respect is central to your practice, together with the idea of creating a space that is adaptable.

MA: Or ephemeral. As designers or architects, we have the tendency to be very controlling and to over-define the way we want people to see things and objects. But if you bring that element of respect into your work then you allow a space of acceptance to exist a more fluid space in which more than just one interpretation is possible. I believe that the moment you accept things for what they are, you start capturing the way that relationships occur between beings and how you can’t control them. Neoptolemos never pruned a single tree because for him that was a metaphor for amputation, and I remember years ago I wanted a plant to go in a certain direction as it climbed up the wall in my house in Waterloo, and the only thing it wanted to do was to go exactly in the opposite direction. I was getting so frustrated. I was frustrated because I was not following the force, the movement, and I learned that it is exactly this: it is how you work around it, how you embrace that resistance and the unpredictability that you cannot control. And one should allow that level of improvisation, even when you create industrial products. As designers, but also as people, we can only bring suggestions and engage in that way with our audience. But any attempt to tame the complexity of the world is just impossible.

AR: How did you get to that space of acceptance as a designer?

MA: I started to figure out what design meant for me when I decided to run away from my engineering training; I wanted to do something creative. But then my years at the Royal College in London from 1991 to 1993 taught me again what I didn’t like about design. I then tried to work out by myself a subject that I had no knowledge of or no experience with, trying to define things as I went along through improvisation, intuition, and the process of elimination. Those psychologically charged objects that dominated the first part of my career, like Design for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times (2004–05), were the manifestation of the fact that I didn’t want to stay in the middle; I ran away from engineering and I went to the opposite side of the spectrum.

AR: Speaking of improvisation, intuition, control, and structure, a lot of your collections exist, if not in a series format, then in what we could define as the exhaustion of all the possibilities inherent in one intuition. You often seem to proceed by expanding and stretching one shape or proportion into a rhythmic series of controlled variations, as if you wanted to see how far you can go with that very same form once it has been interpreted and positioned in all possible ways.

MA: I think it is really about understanding and exhausting all the scenarios that are out there. It is interesting that you mention this obsessive aspect of my work in relation to what I said before about having to figure out what I wanted to do as a de- signer through a process of eliminating all the things I didn’t like about design. Ultimately, that process enabled me to become more accepting and realise that it is actually OK for all things to exist together. I wanted to experiment with the behaviours of objects only to find a way of bringing that level of excitement into industrial products.

AR: I think that this is what, in a way, defines Arrangements (2018), where the methodology that we have seen based on the repetition of one module reaches unexpected conclusions. When you see all the configurations of Arrangements installed together, they look like the notes in a musical score; they possess that formal quality of a musical movement. But you can do all sorts of things with them. It’s a project that you can narrow or expand, that can remain very simple or become expansive: you can keep one individual, minimalistic shape, make a luminous rhythmic wall with a number of them, or go almost baroque and do an exuberant cascade of lights. Arrangements seems to be the formal manifestation of your desire to exhaust all the available possibilities of one shape in order to understand that there is always more.

MA: Normally designers are there to define things and the way objects should appear, while in the case of Arrangements I wanted to shift the focus and offer creativity to the user. I wanted to design an object that can be open to the interpretation of a third party, an object that can absorb a certain level of unpredictability by means of a democratic gesture. Starting from a given set of instructions, you can then explore a space in-between and deviate from the original design.

AR: In a way we are going back to your initial interest in radical design from the late 1960s, and what it generated in terms of a visionary approach to freedom if you also think of Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione? from 1974, with that idea of establishing a module and then giving the user the responsibility to deliver the final product.

MA: What is a plan? A plan is a set of rules that you have to follow, and it may seem that there is nothing more defining than a plan, but in the process of sticking to it you also suddenly realise that a number of other possibilities exist beyond it. With Arrangements, people can practise a form of freedom without that freedom becoming an overwhelming experience. It is interesting to notice how String Lights is commercially less successful than Arrangements, most probably because of the radical freedom that it demands and that can end up being almost intimidating. You open the box and you get this endless piece of string, which you have to draw with. It is like giving you a blank page and saying, ‘This is it, this is the pencil, so now draw’.

AR: Everything seems to be about the user experience at the moment, but there is a difference between being able to customise a pair of sneakers and being in a position to conceive and execute a space through light, as happens with String Lights.

MA: It will define you the same way that your handwriting defines you. It will reflect you, and we are normally scared of sharing too much of ourselves with the outside. Buying design can often be about choosing the right objects and ticking the right boxes of the ‘encyclopaedia of interiors’, while String Lights captures the imagination of the person and, paradoxically, it can also work negatively.

I HEAR AND I FORGET. I SEE AND I REMEMBER. I DO AND I UNDERSTAND.

MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES

‘When I was young, my uncle brought me a vine leaf and placed it on the palm of my hand and said, “Touch this leaf”. It had a very delicate feel. You have to be sensitive to everything around you. You have to be sensitive to the sun, to the light, to the shadows, to the water, the wind. Today, we ignore all these elements, we are inhuman, we violate nature. This worries me’.

I was 12 years old when my father announced that he was to build a house on a family plot of land outside the village where he was born. I had never seen the site before, but from what I had been told, it was an olive grove of trees that were hundreds of years old.

In preparation, he decided to cut them all down, levelled any sign of undulating landscape, and poured gravel over the remaining green: all ready to go! Now he had to find the architect. After all, his best friend had convinced him that he should build a proper house and not a prefabricated unit with basic facilities, as was his original plan. The same friend was wise enough to insist on recommending a man he knew and praised as ‘the best architect’. There was not much convincing to do: my father has always valued his friend’s opinions, and shortly afterwards he assigned this architect the task of building him a home. Carte blanche.

Many years later, I learned that great houses are created through a relationship of trust between the client and the architect. However, only now do I know that what my father really had in mind was literally providing this man with a blank piece of paper, a naked plot of land where any sign of its landscape history had been erased.

Neoptolemos Michaelides could not have wished for a worse curse. Around his own house, he never pruned a single tree. ‘It’s as cruel as amputation’, he used to say.

Neoptolemos had a very unusual relationship with nature at least, one that was unfamiliar to me, though very intriguing. He once told my father that he had something to give him. I remember him pointing at a location on the map by the side of a small road, on the way to the Troodos Mountains. One day Neoptolemos drove with my father to this spot and said, ‘Here is your present! Take it home and I’ll tell you where to place it’. It was a huge rock of red jasper. It was like an act of adoption, ‘borrowing’ a piece from nature and repositioning it, with exactly the same painstaking skill that ancient Chinese scholars had used before. The rest of the rock’s family was in his own home, the smaller siblings that he had managed to ‘rescue’ and relocate years earlier.

I had never experienced the art of viewing to such a degree.

Shortly afterwards, my father returned the gesture, offering Neoptolemos and his wife, Maria, various objects ranging from a bronze, plastic desk clock with his company’s logo on it to African souvenirs, like a hand-carved wooden bust of a woman, which he had picked up on one of his travels to Burundi. ‘Look!’ Maria grabbed my father’s attention one evening when we went to their house for a drink. ‘Look at the beautiful shadow it casts on the wall, like a crawling panther ready to attack’; the ordinary statue had acquired a whole new value, becoming a gobo next to the accidental light that her husband had informally, but beautifully, put together.

From that day on I realised that nothing had ever been thrown into its place accidentally. Each object in relation to others around it and everything in relation to the human scale and the environment, with curated views from carefully positioned seats in the austere setting.

I remember the first time I walked into their home, after an evening invitation from him and his wife, entering a dimly lit space, just enough light to be able to move slowly through the different spaces. I immediately thought that this was a beautiful way of slowing someone down, adjusting your pace to appreciate an environment of such beauty. My father immediately complained that everything was so dark, in a tone that almost required more lights to be installed for the next time we would be around, when Neoptolemos answered softly, ‘There is a reason why there’s the night and there’s the day, and we should not try to turn one into the other’. I sometimes think that his statement was the reason I became a designer of lights.

We started to walk up the marble cantilevered steps, the rail being nothing but the trunk of a young tree that became thinner to the grip as you reached the upper levels. And standing vertical was the main support, another tree, wider at its base, thinning out to almost a point, rising well above the last rail, a few feet below the cast-concrete ceiling in wood-grain relief. It was like the ones Giuseppe Penone carved out years later from these old beams, exposing the young tree within before it grew and was cut square. Only that the passage of time was no longer suggested through the removed layers, but through the appreciation of the younger part as you climbed up.

With the same type of wood were these beautifully simple display cabinets, full of fossils, shells, stones, and minerals, found on their travels or collected locally over the years. I remember going on an excursion with Neoptolemos; with the task of finding crystals, we searched and searched for hours without luck, when suddenly he picked up a perfectly formed round stone that just about fit his palm and offered it to me. ‘Here, a true sphere!’ he said. ‘You can’t beat nature!’

His search for purity was clearly embedded in his refined environments. He always believed that ‘the symbol of culture is the mathematical minus , and the symbol of barbarity is the plus +’.

It was the time that our opinion started to ‘matter’, my brother and me in our early teens, when my father asked us what requests we had from the man who was to build our house. We suddenly felt important, grown-up, and bombarded him with spontaneous, superficial ideas. Anything that came to our minds, probably images borrowed from the homes of fictional characters we admired. I remember specifically asking for a pitched roof, one with an extreme pitch that created this ‘amazing’ space inside. We were both present when our father passed on these requests, when the small gentle man looked at us and just smiled. We never got anything we asked for, only the swimming pool; after all, we shared the same passion for water. Years later, I heard him advise the younger generation in one of his talks ‘to learn the place where we come from, the real one. Not the one with borrowed foreign structures, with roofs of 60 degrees inclination, in a land where we pray for rain’.

‘The British have a very wise saying: doctors bury their mistakes, architects can’t; these structures say a lot about the people who built them’.

A SYSTEM OF THINGS

YIANNIS TOUMAZIS

We live on a planet that is part of a solar system, a solar system which is part of a galaxy, a galaxy that together with other galaxies forms the universe, a universe which itself is a part of the multiverse. Humans and non-humans, subjects and objects operate in a multiplicity of systems, quasi-interdependent yet autonomous.

How do objects affect the human condition? How crucial is the energy of matter in the evolution of situations and events? How does this energy relate to the human factor and how do these critical questions relate to Michael Anastassiades’s meticulously proportioned universe, exhibited at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre?

Things that Go Together is the first international survey exhibition by the Cypriot designer in Nicosia, Cyprus. The exhibition presents an impressive array of objects that Anastassiades has designed throughout the years. The consecutive rooms of the industrial complex of the old Powerhouse, which now houses NiMAC, have become the nexus for this complex demonstration of cumulative energy and matter. Radiant light curtains that resemble enormous otherworldly jewels, hanging mobile luminaries dancing like eerie acrobats: equilibrists or ghostly tightrope walkers on a fragile reality, distant planets and exoplanets of an undefined interstellar system. In the visceral depths of the main gallery space more than 50 objects, ranging from mirrors to tables and from stools to screens made of stone, marble, metal, or glass inscribe in the space a sequence of networks that constantly negotiate, and renegotiate, their endless possibilities, their multifaceted presences, their existential independence.

This extraordinary system of things seems to constantly radiate an accumulative quantity of vital substance, the vibrancy of which is projected onto the space and into the visitor. The multifaceted probabilities, endlessly generated by Anastassiades’s universe, constantly challenge and confront perceived notions of the time-space continuum.

Yet the idea of ‘living matter’ is not new and has long been established as a focal concern in Western philosophy. The political theorist Jane Bennett developed a theory of ‘vital materialism’, which she sees as driving both human and non-human bodies and forces, and also interacting with them. According to Bennett, human and non-human elements affect the course of actions that are inscribed in the sociopolitical sphere and beyond; things (including edibles, commodities, storms, metals) have the capacity ‘not only to impede or block the will and de- signs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’.

In his work The Democracy of Objects, Levi Bryant characterises objects as dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure, while human subjects are themselves simply one variant of objects. For Bryant, an object is subject-less and for itself rather than ‘an opposing pole before or in front of a subject’. Meanwhile, the philosopher Bruno Latour sees active matter as effective and with sufficient consistency to produce change, or to modify the course of events. His concept of the ‘actant’ explicitly deals with the manner in which entities modify other entities, and in a 2012 study Latour observes that ‘it is not unfair to say that political philosophy has often been the victim of a strong tendency to avoid objects’.

Anastassiades’s tour de force is that the things he masterfully creates acquire a meta power, a vital and vibrant energy. This energy leads them to operate as a closed system, one that exists in parallel with that of humans and establishes its jurisdiction over space, time, and the evolution of events. It is as if the things-objects the designer primordially creates construct and follow their own set of rules, ready to interact with humans, but at the same time operating nonchalantly and seductively in a self-sufficient mode. It is exactly the moment where, according to WJT Mitchell, ‘the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls “a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge”’.

As visitors wander through Anastassiades’s brilliantly arranged exhibits, where a transcendent hierarchy seems to govern the three-dimensional continuum, they are definitely overwhelmed by this awe-inspiring energy that overflows the gallery space. The authority, or one could say the supremacy, of the perfectly crafted objects that the designer has envisioned empowers a peculiar mystical process. The objects are transformed into things a hybrid esoteric system beaming vital matter. Democratic or not, noble or brute, this closed and enclosed system seems to act as a spiritual mediator. Through the synergy of things, an idiosyncratic threshold is proposed: a passage and a rhizomatic field in space and a fissure in time. This fluctuating system could, in turn, enclose within it a charged backdrop, which is a point of entry into a place of transcendence and internal transformation, a space of action and reaction, a place for shared participation, collective co-existence, and active collaboration.

Things that Go Together, this exceptional system of things, structured in every detail by Anastassiades himself, ingeniously proposes to the viewer a novel reading of designed objects their raison d’être as well as their resonance.