COMMENTING AAO

Lydia Matthews Member of the AAO: Ethics / Aesthetics Advisory Board

The AAO project is meant as a cultural catalyst: it tries to challenge and inspire artists, designers, architects, students, educators, writers and critical thinkers from all generations and all walks of life to interrupt their ‘business as usual’ and collectively re-imagine what creative practice can look like today. By featuring a wide range of projects from around the world, this exhibition –in combination with conferences and pedagogical workshops– offers a range of strategies for how we might work together to transform difficult conditions within our daily lives, and to experience pleasure in rediscovering our own sense of agency.

Lina Stergiou Concept, Curator at large of AAO

Self-identification is to a great extent determined by the culture of a profession: perceptions, ideologies, evaluations and trends. Against All Odds comprises the nodal point of a continuous journey. Through my business travels to Asia, Europe and the Americas as an invited speaker in conferences and visiting professor it became even clearer to me that the culture of architecture often prevents us from perceiving issues that are self evident to others. AAO project is the trigger, a new beginning for the elimination of dividing lines, so that in collaboration with various other disciplines –such as art and design– we can acquire a clear view of how each one of us can contribute to the evolution of our society.

Jilly Traganou Member of the AAO: Ethics / Aesthetics Advisory Board

This very timely project brings together all recent thinking and creative work by citizens/designers that are concerned with the role of design in the politics of the everyday. It belongs to a generation of public programs that show to the public that design is not purely about form-making. It is rather a process, an engagement with the material world and with the systems that govern it, which, against all odds, provides individuals and communities with agency for change.