Taxiarchis Balaskas              

Tangible Silence

Starting point: Living in a globalized world of materialism and inner emptiness, spiritual traditions around the world can create the basis of a common/known symbolic language to convey notions of profound meaning and understanding, establishing a fundamental shift in priorities and values. While this offers the ground in the development of a post-materialistic and trans-religious design towards Sustainment.

Inspiration: The Hindu refers to the door of Truth; the Buddhism refers to the path of perfection; the Shintoism refers in the transition between the material, the temporal, the finite and the spiritual, eternal and infinite; the Hebrew Bible refers to the gates of the higher realm; the New Testament refers to the narrow door of the inner path and personal sacrifice; the Islam refers to the door which grace descends to earth; the Shamanic refers to the gate that opens only to the worthy and the pure; the prehistoric Cycladic Tiganoshima artifacts, refers to the door of rebirth/transition to pass in the afterlife.

The designed artifact: A narrow threshold/passage from the earthly to the spiritual; the outer to the inner; the refined to the raw. A personal ritual –between two different dimensions of creation the human made condition of intention and the natural manifestation of process, flow, continuity and change; time contained in a moment - to embody meanings of the past and the present, for the future; timeless . The introduction into an alternative starting point for a new system of understanding reality; closely connected to the traditional notion of meaning. A spiritually useful artifact used as a physical reminder for the inner effort that is needed to shift towards Sustainment.

You: Silent and still, create space for thoughts, inner reflection and imagination; “pass through”.
www.taxiarchisbalaskas.com


Born and raised in a small town of Greece, Taxiarchis Balaskas studied Product and System design engineering in a small Cycladic Island named Syros. Currently he is working in Athens with Kostas Lambridis, trying to challenge the known and cultivate a more intuitive way of creating. His interests include counting waves by the sea, collecting stories and designing artifacts that embody tacit values in their materiality, using ontological models of craft and rituals of the past, in order to shift towards Sustainment.

website designed by un.processed realities