In that neighbourhood I curated a curatorial initiative at that time, focusing on this changing of perspective. I still remember a moment when a group of schoolchildren came to visit the exhibition. After the tour we started a conversation about Kypseli, their neighbourhood. I asked them what they liked about it. Their answer was immediate: they liked it when it rained — but not because of the rain itself. Their parents were afraid and asked them to come home immediately after school. The rain gave them an excuse to stay outside a little longer — to sit together waiting for it to pass, on a bus stop seat or on a bench under a covered arcade, without their parents worrying.

That moment — and what those children said — confirmed something simple but essential I had long believed: a city is not defined by its design, but by what it allows people to do — to meet, to stay, to relate. Ever since, a city bench means something different to me.

For years now, I have been speaking three languages on a daily basis — Greek, German, and English. But language is never only words. It is a whole set of cultural codes with its own logic and its own assumptions about what is obvious, what is important, and what does not need to be said — each one representing a distinct history and way of being in the world.

Learning to move between them — literally and metaphorically — has taught me to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to resist easy conclusions, and to find common ground across difference without erasing it.

The Bauhaus understood this instinctively. It was never just a school. It was a community of people from across Europe and beyond, working across art, craft, and architecture, aiming to provide a new way of living and therefore a new society — at a time of profound political instability. When it was forced to close in 1933, its members scattered across the globe, carrying its ideas with them and planting them in entirely new contexts.

The Bauhaus did not produce a single language but rather a way of thinking across borders, cultures and disciplines.

Yet for decades, his work remained largely unknown outside a small circle of specialists. No major exhibition. No accessible publication. A story waiting to be told.

Researching his life and writings for my doctoral thesis, I realized that the gap was not only about Despotopoulos. It was about something larger: the distance between what scholars know and what the broader public can access.

The exhibition "From Building to Community: Ioannis Despotopoulos and the Bauhaus" was my first big attempt to close that gap — to take what I had found in the archive and make it something people could experience, understand, and connect to their own lives. It is presented permanently at the building of the Athens Conservatoire, which Despotopoulos designed himself as a space of educational community.

Today, the idea of bringing that knowledge to the broader public has become my major focus. Through guided tours at the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, through writings, lectures, digital presence and public programmes. The form changes. The question remains the same: how do we make the knowledge that matters reach the people it belongs to?