Entering the Mythmaking Studio of Antonakis we find ourselves inside a dollhouse built from studies of rooms, landscapes of fear and authority, where animals, monsters, boys, and emperors wander. Each work is a surface upon which something returns, a scene restaged, inhabited by beings that dwell at the thresholds of body, gender, and identity. We do not know whether it is haunted or archival, a refuge or a nightmare; yet memory and imagination, fear, desire and obsession share the same space, and the stories are rewritten slightly differently each time.

In the “imagined elsewhere” of Antonakis, forms shift, change roles, test new positions within the same stage. It is a kind of “elsewhere” which, as Donna Haraway describes, is not a site of escape but of coexistence, a place where the embodied and the imaginary, matter and meaning, are interwoven, producing hybrid assemblages. His dollhouse thus becomes a subversive game, a field of contestation, where rooms, bodies, and fragments of narratives are rearranged, continually testing how they might come together, with him, and with whoever gazes upon them. The return to sets, themes, and characters — the Mad King, the Two Johns, or the childhood nightmare once sketched long ago, becomes an aesthetic strategy. Repetition turns into a tool, a way to test the same material until it changes form. Each image is an occasion for transition, to move through spaces where the personal and the mnemonic coexist in constant reshaping, spaces that, this time, are inhabited by creatures wanting to escape.

Beings composed of recognisable parts that return at times monstrous, like unruly sensations, or, as familiar ghosts peeking behind the veil, or even as spectral versions of Antonakis himself. Metamorphoses that operate both as destabilising “becoming” and as survival mechanisms against the void of loneliness. This rupture is not abstract: in the orgy scenes, it pierces through the bodies themselves, rendering them multiple and unstable, allowing them to embody desire and repulsion, intimacy and terror at once. Cerberus and Megaera are nodes of relation, figures revealing their cultural construction; the “contaminating” vampires unsettle the binary of the mythical and the real, and the Cat, standing alone upon the theater stage, returns the gaze to the viewer just as the Badger lies dead there but alive elsewhere. These creatures function as meeting points, revealing that what we perceive as a boundary is already a passage, inviting us, too, to move uncertainly with a chimeric disposition, alongside them.

And somewhere within this dollhouse, an echo of Walter Benjamin can be heard, not appearing as an Angel, stunned before the ruins of history, striving in vain to piece them together, but as an Acrobat who traverses these ruins with their body: testing, stumbling, smiling, and crying in the midst of the fall. An Acrobat, or perhaps a Chimera, like Antonakis himself, a being composed of remnants of fear and traces of desire, gathering and reassembling the matter of the past in order to reshape it into a myth that remains still alive.