dionysios on precarious design: turning found objects into sites of care and functional ritual

Dionysios on Care, Improvisation, and the Passage of Time

Multidisciplinary artist Dionysios presents Precarious Design, a series of objects and installations that explore fragility, impermanence, and improvisation. The works span design, sculpture, and installation, appearing suspended between utility and artifact, carrying the traces of time, use, and human care. designboom discusses with Dionysios how found and salvaged materials carry memory, how fragility becomes a source of resilience, and how his series transforms instability into functional, ritual-infused objects. The artist shares insights on shaping experience, embracing impermanence, and creating works where scarcity and care become central to design. ‘Precariousness is not weakness; it’s a form of truth. It forces you to stay alert, to remain awake to the present moment,’ Dionysios notes during our interview.

Rooted in his background in clinical psychology, the Greek artist approaches each project as a choreography of experience. ‘I often think less like a “maker” and more like a choreographer of experience: how someone interacts with the work, what they feel without realizing why, and how they might leave changed.’ Dionysios is drawn to the histories embedded in materials. ‘They carry memory. A found object has already lived a life before it enters my work. Scratches, dents, traces of touch, passage of time. When I use it, I’m not starting from zero; I’m in conversation with that past,’ he tells designboom.

Meditation on Time | image by Raf Souliotis, courtesy of Onassis Foundation

precarious design explores human interaction

The Precarious Design series was presented in two contexts during the Art Athina 2025 fair. At Taxidi Tinos’ booth in the Design section, Cave Drawings inscribes sun and moon motifs in gold and silver leaf on rusted steel, their lacquered backs recalling couture linings while their corroded surfaces evoke humanity’s earliest marks. Across town at the art and design platform Spazio Altro, the exhibition PLAYDATE gathered objects including the Koutsombola (gossip bench), Balance Chair, Surrealist Side Table, and Totem. These pieces combine marble fragments, ancient timbers, and repurposed plastics into provisional yet fully functional forms, while gold leaf applied to century-old cypress logs and olive roots imbues salvaged matter with symbolic weight.

For Dionysios, the conceptual approach of Precarious Design stems from his broader practice. ‘We live in a world that sells us permanence and perfection, but in reality everything is temporary, everything shifts. Relationships, cities, even nature feel unstable. Through Precarious Design, and my practice overall, I don’t try to disguise that, I highlight it,’ he reflects. The series builds on the artist’s ongoing exploration of impermanence, which he has pursued in other works such as Meditation on Time (2022), presented at Onassis Stegi’s Plásmata 3 in Athens, and the durational performance Meditation on Light (2023) at the Great Pyramids of Giza. Read on for our full conversation with the Athens- and Paris-based artist.

Meditation on Time (2022) was presented at Onassis Stegi’s Plásmata 3 in Athens

designboom interviews dionysios

designboom (DB): You started out in clinical psychology. How does that background influence the way you create?

Dionysios (D): Psychology gave me a way to think in terms of relationships and dynamics. Whether I’m making a sculpture, a design object, a digital piece, or a large-scale installation, I’m not just arranging forms, I’m shaping behavior, atmosphere, even silence. It trained me to see the conscious and unconscious simultaneously, to notice what’s expressed and what’s left unspoken. I often think less like a ‘maker’ and more like a choreographer of experience: how someone interacts with the work, what they feel without realizing why, and how they might leave changed. I don’t use psychology as a method anymore, but it remains the quiet foundation of how I see people, spaces, and the interactions between them.

a crystallized truck as meditation on time, divinity, and reflection | image via @bydionysios

DB: When did you realize you wanted to work across sculpture, installation, and digital media rather than just one medium?

D: I don’t think there was a single moment. For me, it was never about choosing a discipline. It was about choosing the right language for each idea. Sometimes an idea needs the weight of a physical object, other times it needs to stretch into space and become an environment, and other times it belongs in the digital layer that now shadows our lives. What excites me is the movement between these forms, how they overlap, contradict, or amplify each other. I guess I realized quite early that confining myself to one medium would feel like cutting the wings off the work before it even began.

a relic from the future | image via @bydionysios

DB: Many of your pieces use discarded or salvaged objects. What draws you to these materials?

D: They carry memory. A found object has already lived a life before it enters my work. Scratches, dents, traces of touch, passage of time. When I use them, I’m not starting from zero; I’m in conversation with that past. There’s also something democratic about it: these objects are ordinary, recognizable, and almost invisible in their daily use, but when you shift their context, they reveal new meanings. And personally, I like the tension between fragility and endurance, an old car part, a worn surface, an ancient piece of wood, or a marble scrap. They are both vulnerable and resilient. I am also a huge advocate for sustainability, not as a political stance, but as a way of being. There is an abundance of materials to work with and transform.

Sunset Chair | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Can you explain Precarious Design in your own words?

D: Precarious Design is the more functional, sculptural side of my practice. For me, it’s about embracing instability rather than hiding it. We live in a world that sells us permanence and perfection, but in reality everything is temporary, everything shifts. Relationships, cities, even nature feel unstable.

Through Precarious Design, and my practice overall, I don’t try to disguise that, I highlight it. A work might look monumental, but if you look closer you see its sensitivity, its ability to change or even collapse. Expanding this into functional design pieces is my way of stretching the idea into the tangible, the everyday, creating objects to live with. Precariousness is not weakness; it’s a form of truth. It forces you to stay alert, to remain awake to the present moment.

Balance Chair 2 | image courtesy of Spazio Altro

DB: Your work often explores fragility and impermanence. Why are these ideas important to you?

D: Because they are unavoidable. Everything I’ve learned, through psychology, through life, through making, points back to impermanence. Objects decay, bodies age, structures fall apart. But within that transience, you also find a strange kind of eternity. Life itself is fragile and impermanent. I think it would be almost arrogant to create something that pretends to last forever. I’d rather make something that speaks to the present, to this exact encounter with the viewer. If it lasts, that’s beyond me. But the ephemerality, that’s where the intensity comes from. It’s a paradox I keep returning to: the eternal inside the temporary.

Dionysios approaches each project as a choreography of experience | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Meditation on Light at the Pyramids sounds incredible! What was it like to show your work there?

D: It was surreal, intense, overwhelming, probably the most transformative experience I’ve had to date. I went with the intention to present a perfect gold carpet at the feet of the pyramids, only for the desert to bury it, to destroy it. That’s when I truly understood my work and myself: learning to surrender to external forces and let the piece become what it is meant to be. It turned into a long-durational, performative installation rather than a monumental static object. People from the desert, camel riders, exhibition visitors, and guides all came each day to help add gold leaf, knowing it would be erased at night and start again the next day. It taught me humility and the power of collective effort. What moved me most was the fleeting nature of the work coexisting, even briefly, with something that has stood for thousands of years. That tension between the ephemeral and the eternal is exactly where my practice lives.

Meditation on Light at Great Pyramids of Giza – Art d’Egypte 2023 | image courtesy of the artist

DB: Looking ahead, what directions or experiments excite you most in your work?

D: I want to keep pushing the boundaries of where art can live. That means larger public works in iconic locations. But also unexpected collaborations with technology, theater, maybe even cinema or fashion. I’m interested in how an installation can shift when it meets the dramaturgy of a stage or the rigor of a science lab, and how an object might function in a ritual outside of the white cube. At the same time, I’m continuing to explore the overlap between the physical and the digital, not in a loud, ‘tech-first’ way, but in subtle infusions where nature, light, and code intertwine. Ultimately, what excites me is keeping the work alive, unstable, open to mutation. I don’t want a fixed formula. I want to surprise myself, and by extension, the audience.

Koutsombola chair | image courtesy of Spazio Altro