Dimitrios Moutafidis
Dimitrios is an architect pursuing a Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS AD) at MIT. He is interested in the crossings of architectural design, environmental history (energy and meteorology), media theory, and philosophies of difference. His past research revolved around the chromatic materialities of Greek votive offerings as mediums for transforming caves into sites of transcendence. His ongoing research called "Selenographies" is an art and design experiment for performing screen-printing as an embodied “tide” for re-texturing modern epistemic, physiological, and tactile relationships with the moon. Dimitrios current research, called “Lightning Archaeologies”, imagines how design can be performed with the Earth’s energies and how the discipline can imagine space and time with them. Through it, he inquires what decentered design agencies can emerge from the epistemic, and even experiential, entanglements of the Earth’s energies with humans, inspired by non-modern cosmologies that enable transcalar correspondences between the cosmos, weather, and human bodies.
The project was exhibited in: “Unfiguring: Experiments in the Practice of Science and Art”, March 2024, Graduate Students Interdisciplinary Conference, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.
An object of wonder and socio-political projection and embedded in mythic and supernatural networks, the moon has diachronically pluralized the imagination of humans while being mediated by physiological, technical and cultural energies. In Selenographies, I search for the moon’s materialities which I detect in the in traces of their plural relations and synchronizations with the Earth’s life rhythms: In the pulses, temporalities and vibrances of organisms in the nocturnal lands and oceanic-scapes; in the agency of the moon’s soft luminance to guide micro-organisms and affect coral spawn; in its mythogenic efficacies, its gravitational agency to animate the Earth’s crust and its agency to temporalize the cultural life of humans.
