Meta Morphée
Thomas Egoumenides is a French designer, architect and artist.
Through collaboration with local actors and resources, he transforms and
revalues discarded objects, bringing attention to their inherent qualities and worth.
Rather than waiting for the recycling stage, Thomas intervenes early in the
process, making minimal modifications to materials while respecting their history and current context.
His creative vision involves reimagining the urban environment as a vast
repository of materials and narratives, akin to a ‘matériotheque’. By skillfully weaving and reshaping these diverse material layers, he redefines our
man-made world.
During a residency for the Tunis Dream City Art Festival in 2021, he initiated the project Rascal, an ephemeral design and upcycling research laboratory.
His remarkable work caught the attention of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023, where he presented his installation “The Ship Of Theseus”.
In 2024, he presents in Tunis his first solo exhibition with Yosr Ben Ammar
Gallery, titled “Meta Morphée.”
Morpheus, from Ancient Greek, “the maker of shapes,” rooted in the Greek word “μορφή” (morphḗ), meaning “form” or “shape.” In Greek mythology, Morpheus is the God of Dreams, often depicted as a winged daemon spirit capable of
assuming various forms.
How can we break and twist materials, disrupting their primary narrative, to
unburden meanings, to play around and find solutions? To open spaces
within the meanings, spaces in which we can inject our personal and collective memories and discard remnants of the past. Like the plastic that surrounds us, often overlooked and camouflaged in its surroundings, Thomas Egoumenides’ work is in-your-face: it seizes space and yet, sometimes, it is hidden.
Egoumenides’ current practice explores narratives of the familiar, the obsolete, and the ordinary through the use of Plastic and Metal. He finds significance in ordinary objects that many people have associations and experiences with, allowing viewers to attach their own interpretations to his recreated works.
Through manipulation of materials by stripping, stretching, crumpling, cutting, burning and assembling, the artist transforms them into compositions,
patchworks, and sculptural bodies. The materials become objects of inquiry and instruction, collected site-specifically and revamped into hanging seared
tapestries, or stretched textures on metal frames.
Meta Morphée celebrates the potential for poeticizing the mundane, the
useless, and unwanted materials – an exploration between art, place, and
materiality.