“In 2004 at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti in Rome, Papadimitriou collected the rubbish standing around in the foundation’s basement – old office supplies, including Olivetti’s own outmoded yet fully-functional models of computers, typewriters, faxes – and created a temporary office upstairs in the exhibition space. While reviving the defunct history of Olivetti, Papadimitriou made this past into a public secretarial space where tourists on their way to and from the nearby Piazza Navona might take a rest, reorganise themselves and perhaps write a postcard on a vintage typewriter. Here, the past is not an object, nor a spectacle; what travelers take away is an experience of writing the present with the tools of the past” (Allen, J. “A Local Home Away from Home” in exh. cat. The People’s Choice, p. 209).

The concept of temporary as implied to in the title takes on a binary meaning in this context. In the first instance, the word responds to a purely temporal perspective, specifically that of definite duration. However, despite this capacity for temporal definition there is the notion of the indefinite which lays in the precarity of the situation, the makeshift use of space established to serve a purpose: an ideal abandoned ready to fulfil another one’s dream or desire. This recycling process of both space and object serve as a metaphor for the precarious situations mankind builds for itself, feeding the incessant need for change and transformation.

Maria Halkias