Objects of common interest is formed by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis with the focus in creating still life installations and experiential environments and objects, demonstrating a fixation with materiality, concept and tangible spatial experiences.
They aim to create projects that balance between the long lasting and the ephemeral projects in time and objects whose creative approach stems from an abstract realm enriched with layers of conceptual readings: moments of unfamiliar simplicity, sculptural and material selfexpression, structural articulation. Their work roots from an amalgamation of thinking and making between two diverse poles, Greece and New York, switching between the formal and the intuitive, embracing the handmade and the tactile, the experimental and the poetic. Eleni and Leonidas received their academic education at Aristotle University in Greece and Ecole Supérieure d’Architecture de La Villette in Paris and hold a masters degree in architecture from Columbia University in New York and are founding partners of sibling studio LOT office for architecture.
“In our work we have been interested in abstraction through the formal and material investigation, simplicity and juxtaposition, not of materials themselves, but of their characteristic properties guided by general notions and spatial qualities such as: solid and void, opaque and transparent, rigid and malleable, natural and artificial. Using the concepts of defamiliarization and illusion, we manipulate perception through spatial exercises and gestural forming, to create objects — mono-material or often by articulation of more than one — disguising their weight, softness, structure: a volume resting upon another, a light tube seemingly bent or a see-through inflatable appearing as solid and heavy.”