Designer Veatriki Chasiotou, founder of ONIROLITHI - “it’s the digital era, the post human, metaverso era. I think it’s community power!”

ONIROLITHI will be exhibiting at HOMI FASHION&JEWELS EXHIBITION 11 - 14 March 2022
A dedication to sustainability, craftsmanship, design and manufacturing with the ultimate accuracy. HOMI FASHION&JEWELS EXHIBITION explores a cultural challenge, is sustainability an utopian fantasy or a possibility?

We really love your ring with the eye, and starting from there, there’s a message that we should all think like, closing our eyes, and looking inside of ourselves. As humans, what are we doing to the planet? What are we doing to change? How is Greece after COVID? 

It has been difficult for us, as in every country, people are tired. We have changed. Greeks are like Italians; we like to hug, we like to talk, we like to touch, and now we are afraid, you don’t know how to act anymore. I think lockdowns have changed us. I feel sorry for the young people, they cannot go out, they cannot fall in love and date like before, they cannot do anything. COVID will go away, but the consequences will remain. As for the planet, humans have been hurting it for decades, and we need an action plan to restore it, yesterday!

Maybe after all of this, we will start having deep we will discover ourselves more close to one another, having more personal relationships

It will take a while until we go back to normal, what we knew as normal. For me, it's okay. I'm older but young people, children, for example, have been confined into their homes for two years. How do we undo what has been done? How do we explain to them that there’s a new way of doing things? 

And the technology and digital have been developed a lot

Indeed! In Greece we had to deal with a lot of paperwork in the past but there seems to be an ongoing digitisation project for all public services which makes transactions so much faster. Also because of the pandemic, everything had to be moved online to protect people. From the way we work to the way we shop, and the way we socialise.

Do you feel we’ve been controlled a lot these past two years? 

Yes. In Greece, we were supposed to send text messages to a governmental service when we wanted to leave the house. We had to send a message to say that we were going to the doctor’s, to the supermarket or to go for a walk. 

Do you think it helped not to spread the virus?

Oh, at the beginning when the pandemic started, we were doing fine in Greece. The thing is that people were not vaccinated yet or they didn’t follow what doctors’ suggestions and that’s how it spread fast. Also, people questioned what doctors said and had their own opinion. I'm not a doctor. Yes, I can decide on a personal level what is best for myself but I can’t decide for you; and I can’t question the knowledge of health professionals and risk lives by listening to what random folks who aren’t doctors think. I don't ask an architect, whose job is to design houses if I should be vaccinated. I ask a doctor, whose job is to maintain and restore human health. And then I can decide what works to protect myself and the people around me.

I'd love to talk to you about the environmental issues that are happening and what we could do to help our planet and help our situation and change

I think the problem starts with the big companies and the way goods are distributed. Everything is covered in plastic. It's not okay, as there are many alternatives today. We know better than drinking with plastic straws or using plastic bags. The problem is that companies want to profit by eliminating costs, and unfortunately, sustainable options cost more. We should all be sensitive to environmental issues. I think younger people are doing it the proper way and are way more informed than my generation.

When you said that you had to leave messages saying where you were going to, do you feel that we are very much controlled, and we are part of the system that is not much ours? You know, we don't really have control over it

Yes, we are part of a system, and we are somehow controlled, politically and socially. Even digitally! For example, see how digital ads work; I decide to look for something that I don't normally look for, let's say wooden chair, and then the next day, hundreds of ads come to me about wooden chairs. I can't believe they're reading my mind, but sometimes it feels like it, like Big Brother is watching me, somebody's watching me. 

That's the digital era, the post human era…it's all going very much into this direction. People are even buying things that exist only online with NFTs for example

Yes and it’s scary, isn’t it? There’s no privacy anymore. Also let’s talk about how much it has affected the way we communicate. When people go out today, what do they do? They are sitting next to each other, and instead of asking "what's your name?”, they say, "are you on Instagram?" and then they keep on playing with the phone instead of communicating in real life. In my eyes, and I’m from a different generation, it seems that the screen works like a protective shield. Why are people afraid to be exposed and show how amazing and unique they really are? At the same time, because of the internet, information travels fast, and distances are eliminated. This helps people to be in a community, and community is power.