Stamos Michael is a self-taught artist and designer based in Athens. Ηe studied sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and has worked in various creative fields, focusing on architecture and applied arts. In 2016 he founded GRACE, an independent cultural platform which occupied an abandoned neoclassical hotel in Athens, aiming to reclaim the hotel’s empty space and reintegrate it back into the active landscape of the city as a place for cultural development and creative interaction. In Michaels’ work, specific qualities commonly attributed to physical space (open or closed, available or occupied) are combined with actions such as intervention, reconstruction or abandonment to set up a sociological methodology for perceiving reality. While processing a system for understanding and dealing with reality which resonates with practices widely used in social studies and critical architecture, Michael appropriates both the notion and the means of architecture in order to express ideas related to the management of physical space. Through a multidisciplinary practice bringing together architectural design, functional art, digital media and textual landscape analysis, Michael aims to establish a new sense of architecture which seeks to force itself through a space that is, for the most part, taken. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).