In Venice, Andreas Angelidakis Is Queering the Idea of a National Pavilion

Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis will take over the Greek Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, delivering an anti-fascist escape room embellished with intentionally campy flourishes. Half Greek, half Norwegian, Angelidakis studied architecture in Los Angeles and in New York. His artistic practice is deeply interdisciplinary, encompassing architecture, publishing, exhibition design and curation. A self-proclaimed internet obsessive, he remixes online culture with architectural emblems, creating environments that explore how space and infrastructure are inextricable from power.

Using the pavilion’s national and architectural legacy as source material, he scrutinizes the venue’s inaugural year, 1934, through historical research. The year the pavilion debuted, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time in Venice. The roots of fascism lay latent there, resonating alarmingly with today’s MAGA zeal and even Italy’s own far-right government. The installation—curated by fellow Athenian George Bekirakis—draws from virtual reality, Fire Island gatherings, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the legacy of the Greek empire. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the soft sculptures and contemplate the themes of the show, including the way past political turmoil slithers into the present, the marketability of tourism and antiquity-as-spectacle.

We spoke with Angelidakis about his “Byzantium goth disco,” as he dubbed his installation, in addition to his memories of attending the biennial as a young visitor, buying unofficial riot shields online and what he’ll be doing at 4:20 p.m. on the Biennale’s opening day.

Tell me about how you conceptualized the pavilion.

I treat the pavilion as a being with consciousness, and I give her the microphone. The subject is the building itself, which looks like an Orthodox Church. The pavilion was built in 1934—12 years after [the Lausanne convention, which recognized the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey]—and it’s literally a souvenir of a MAGA moment for Greece. It’s like a Trump hat left over from that period. On the ministry’s website, they have a great text from a historian about the political maneuvers behind the pavilion being Byzantine. The competition was canceled because they wanted to assign somebody to make it exactly like that. I exhibited at the Greek pavilion four times with the architecture biennial, and I had never checked what the columns are. Digging a bit on Google, I realized [they] are copies of Hagia Sophia’s columns.

The year 1934 is also interesting because it’s the year that the fascist egg hatched, in a way. Mussolini wanted to meet Hitler in person, and so he invited him to the Venice Biennale, where two pavilions were being inaugurated: Austria and Greece. Those were the two countries that were being nominated to join the Axis of the Germans and Italians. Austria, of course, became part of the Axis; Greece did until the war started. We switched back to the Allied forces.

So I was looking at the pavilion in this context, the histories. The year 1934 is also the year of the pink list: Hitler identifying homosexuals in his own ranks and killing them. And the Night of the Long Knives [a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30-July 2, 1934, intended to consolidate Hitler’s power]… political analysts are saying that what’s happening in Washington is from the Nazi playbook.

How do these loaded themes manifest formally and spatially, in terms of what the visitor encounters?

The pavilion has a double persona; it is split in two. The national part is all about the history of the country and statecraft. There was a national schism in 1915: Greece was split in two for two years. There was a government in Athens and a government in Thessaloniki. Greece was a country that colonized itself. There are the Greeks, but there’s also the indigenous population that grew up in an Ottoman context.

The other part is a kiosk or períptero, as a pavilion is called in Greek. The períptero has a digital stage that collects information—basically a surveillance system in a feedback loop. There’s this giant screen, then the other side looks like a mix between a discotheque and a police station. There are neon signs with pink eggs, but behind them are riot shields with handles on the opposite sides. I’m using the riot shield a lot. I buy copies on Temu, and then they become a work.

There are souvenirs hanging: the words immigrant and homosexual, T-shirts with historical diagrams, Plato wearing Peggy Guggenheim glasses and military boats from the Border Patrol. Sculptures, 3D printed, are placed in fridges that usually sell drinks on the street. I wanted to be giving out drinks inside the pavilion—or water, because in a biennial, everybody’s looking for water. I was like, what if we could get a water company to make us a bottle of water.

That would have been very in-demand. What is your relationship to previous Venice biennials as a visitor? Does it feel particularly meaningful to partake as an artist?

For me, it’s incredibly meaningful to have that happen this late in my career; I turn 60 in two years. I’ve been going to Venice since 1997. The first time I was with a friend who was just becoming a biennial superstar, Vanessa Beecroft, so I kind of experienced the whole thing. I crashed parties when I was younger, and I didn’t have money to take a taxi or even a vaporetto.

I visited in 2007, which was Nikos Alexiou; he was referencing Byzantium. And there were years that I got bored of it. But I went to Cecilia Alemani’s biennial—she did only women in the central pavilion, you would see Nan Goldin and Leonora Carrington and Marisol. It was amazing. Now I come to Venice as somebody who’s been there a lot.

Although there is serious political discourse here, can you elaborate on the more playful elements that you implement? I mean, even just Plato wearing Peggy Guggenheim glasses.

Peggy is not random—she’s part of the storyline of the pavilion. Cecilia Alemani recently did a show on how the Greek pavilion was rented to Peggy Guggenheim in 1948: that’s where she first showed the Surrealists and the Cubists in Europe. I’m five Peggys away from the original, but she’s still part of the story, because that was the first time the pavilion experienced art that was not politically guided—it had been, until 1948.

The title of the piece is Escape Room, which is a very popular type of entertainment. I mean, it’s global. Venice is full of escape rooms. But the escape room is a format that came from video games. In 2007 in Japan, they made a physical escape room—which is the definition of Plato’s cave. You are placed in a reality that doesn’t make sense, and you have to escape from it.

I’m still working on the trinkets zone. “Pavilion” in Greek is also the yellow kiosks everywhere that sell everything from drinks to tourist souvenirs. Usually, they’re close to archeological sites, full of little Parthenon sculptures. My subject is tourism as well, because Greece really was just a souvenir country for the philosophy of antiquity. I play between souvenir and bibelot—the souvenir is for the traveler, the bibelot is for the collector. I’m treating both in a democratic way. And I mean, Venice is very familiar with merchandising. I guess I’m trying to say that history is a toy, and we can play with it. In Greek, story and history are the same word.

The fun part is that it looks like a nightclub. There’s a huge disco floor playing a song that was very radically gay during the AIDS crisis: “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. In 1983, they came on the pop scene wearing leather jockstraps. It’s a song about fisting. The cover of the record was a version of Guernica. Then there’s a Byzantine instrument used in monasteries to call the priest, which is just two pieces of wood hit together, but it’s kind of the same rhythm as “Relax.” And then there are also some street recordings from Athens playing sometimes.

People are allowed to touch everything and can hang out and have a conversation. They can sit on the soft pieces. The soft sculpture is a replica of the two columns of the pavilion in different sizes. They’re sculptural bean bag chairs. They kind of sit on a Guernica aerial yoga sculpture.

I’ve never heard those words together, ha. Do you see yourself as queering the pavilion?

There weren’t many incidents of queer history within the pavilion. I’m queering the idea of a national pavilion, I guess, and, if not, playing with, let’s say, the idea of a monument and souvenir shop. I’m resetting the pavilion in a way, by turning it into an escape room: fun, scary, camp. And the Peggy reference will also be a big sign on the door, which is the Peggy glasses made out of chain that’s soldered, and the lenses are riot shields. But her glasses are the wings of a bat. The fridges are full of humans turning into owls or trying to fly. It’s all male figures, because it’s a male problem, politics and war, as far as I can see.

We’re doing a tribute to a party on Fire Island, which is a Tea Dance. I grew up reading descriptions of how gay men were almost being wheeled in there in the early 1980s, still going to Fire Island and partying even though they were barely alive. So we’re doing the Tea Dance at 4:20 p.m. in the afternoon.

I love that.

I’m doing it with a group called Power Dance Club, a famous gay Greek group on the underground club night scene. The club in Fire Island was called the Pavilion; I’ve been there, and I’ve been to the Tea Dance once. You could sense that these guys who are still there—they were in their 60s—had been through, like, war. You can see it on their bodies.

The Tea Dance will just be for the inauguration?

Yeah, it’s like a big gay party at the Greek pavilion, inside the installation. We’re doing a micro-version. No invitation needed—but, of course, it’s inside the Giardini, which is already an invitational place. Four o’clock is when the officials start to speak, so I give them 20 minutes to say what they have to say, then we start the party inside the installation. We can’t be bothering the other pavilions, but there’s a sound system. People can bring their drinks in and lie on the beanbags.

That sounds fun. I love that you give the officials 20 minutes, and then you’re like, “Here we go!”

I wanted to have 4:20, that code, out in the world. The flyer will have reference to an Andrew Holleran book that talks about New York in the 1980s, and there’s a Fire Island chapter. It’s a beautiful kind of elegy. It’s very layered, but nobody has to look at every layer: it will be spooky, crazy, fun, loud. Everything is allowed.

Right, you can engage with the work on different levels: the political or the spectacle.

If somebody who works as a riot policeman happens to be in the audience, they might like it, because it would be familiar.

I’m not sure how many riot police are going to attend the Venice Biennale.

I don’t know. ICE doesn’t travel? [With an Italian accent] Giacomo Polizia!

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