Christos Papoulias | In Defence of the Crypt

Composition: Alexis Kalofolias

In dialogue with: Weak Works | The Architecture of Christos Papoulias and His Friends

An original composition commissioned for the exhibition

Alexis Kalofolias’s soundscape will be played in the exhibition halls daily, from 11:30 am to 12:00 pm and from 4:30 pm to 5:00 pm.

The score explores the sonic landscape that might emerge from the convergence of the elements Christos Papoulias held to be central to his thought and practice: darkness and light, and their interplay as anthropological, historical and spatial magnitudes; and the abolition of the artificial divisions that undermine architecture’s commitment to being an art in the service of people and landscape, driving it instead towards affectation and a sterile museality.

The sound is organised in two superimposed layers: one dark, grounded in the low frequencies; the other luminous, sparse, almost transparent. The composition brings together thematic strands that run alongside one another, none taking precedence over the others: field recordings from the places where Papoulias lived and worked, extracts from his interviews and sonic renderings of his materials. Guided by his own accounts of his life and trajectory, the music attempts a geometry of sounds that locates, in acoustic terms, the point at which the maker meets the thinker — constructing a crypt, a space of deposition “without elevations”, as he described his designs for the Acropolis Museum.

The spatial “music” of Christos Papoulias is defined neither by the claim of the particular to dominate the general nor by any strident historicism, but by the asceticism of the maker and the synthesising capacity of the architectural gaze. It explores the presence of the past within the present: a presence that lays claim to the present, exceeds it and is at the same time reconciled with it — much like the bass line described by Jean Starobinski, which does not erase the old places and rhythms but sets them in the background.

About the composer

Alexandros (Alexis) Kalofolias is a musician and translator. He has translated literature professionally since 1995 — including works by George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, Leonard Cohen, J. M. Coetzee and Patti Smith — and his translations have been recognised with the EILM/EAE Award (2013) and the Ioulia Iatridi Award (2026). He is also a member of the bands The Last Drive, The Earthbound, Thee Holy Strangers and Alex K & the Circle, with fifteen LPs and five EPs to his name, and composes music for theatre, film and dance.

In the photo:

Erichthonian Museum of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece, 1990–1991 (unbuilt project)
Spatial ideogram of the roof plan from the entrance level
Print and graphite on tracing paper, 29.3 × 42 cm
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris

© Christos Papoulias
Photo credit: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Jean-Claude Planchet