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‘Dbut what if I’m smoking while we’re talking?” asks Andreas Angelidakis as we all lean on a bean bag in a fallen pillar. “Don’t you care if it’s drugs? If it’s cannabis?” He pulls an elaborate pink cigarette wrapper from his black Nike airsoft and lights it. “It’s my anxiety medicine,” he says, before thinking again. “No, I’m just drunk.”
The artist likes to see the world changed a little – which you can tell as soon as you enter the escape room, the name of his installation in the Greek pavilion on. this year’s Venice Biennale. The Pavilion, which was designed by M Papandreou and established in 1934, the year Hitler met Mussolini here, was created with a light dance floor, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax breathing from the soundtrack and old broken monuments are hung from the ceiling or arranged as seating.
The columns immediately refer to Guernica, Picasso’s protest against the 1937 bombing of the Spanish city by the Nazis and Italy; the problem of migration, which Angelidakis says is a modern-day Guernica; and the sex of artists – since, he says, they agree to the soft materials that were once known as pouffes. His penchant for stoning also comes into play: his yard was officially opened at 4.20pm – a wrong profile maybe they lost the dignitaries who conducted the ceremony. After that, there was an evening dance, or “tea dance”, with Greek DJs from the Power Dance Club, right now on a very hot Berlin night.
With the pavilion’s dancefloor there is an LED screen broadcasting a hall of glass-style images of its guests, which Angelidakis says is a nod to Plato’s cave, a philosophical legend of people who thought that images were created by external mechanisms that were real; a souvenir shop with great books and T-shirts, including the memory of an LGBTQ+ activist Zak Kostopouloswho was beaten to death by civilians and police in Athens in 2018; violent shields protecting two neon eggs that represent “fascism that broke in 1934”; and inflatables that hang on the walls, written with modified versions of Maga’s descriptive words. One says Make Erika Eat Again, referring to Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika. “He’s amazing,” Angelidakis says. “They tell her to be sad and she comes dressed like Janet Jackson doing Rhythm Nation, with a black hat, almost doing the Elon Musk salute.”
The artist’s “permanent and difficult” essays are taken everywhere: from TikTok events to history, all of them in one way or another highlight the problems we have as a correct attempt to take over the world. At the instigation of curator George Bekirakis, there is also a space dedicated to Vaso Katraki, the artist who was the only Greek artist who was awarded a painting in Venice, for his paintings in 1966, and was thrown into prison for being a communist the following year.
The idea is to give the pavilion a voice: “If it could talk, this is what it would say,” Angelidakis says. The building’s history is fraught, he adds. It was opened at the same time Greece and Austria wants to join the alliance of fascist powers with Italy and Germany, while its Byzantine appearance also speaks to the interests of the Greek government.
“You know, let’s make Istanbul Constantinople again,” Angelidakis says – in other words, turn back the clock to the pre-Ottoman era. “That has been the slogan for centuries – even though Byzantium was the Roman Empire and we were captured by it. He pulls up his fence and says: “You know, I’m against the courts of the world, that’s why I’m turning it into a place of refuge.”
Angelidakis tells me the history of escape rooms, immersive games where a person is locked in a room and has to figure out how to get out. “It first happened as an online game in 2003 or 2004. But in 2007 the Japanese decided to build one in Tokyo. Which is like the moment of January 6, when the Internet appears. This, for me, is the interest of the escape room. I wouldn’t go there because there is too much reality in my mind – I don’t want anything more.”
And would it be scary to throw stones at them again? “I don’t want to be afraid,” said the artist. “My notes here are very clear about how I do things.” He shows me two dice drawn in his hand, along with a bottle of pills. Just roll the dice and see what happens. Or click and twist the pill cap.
Angelidakis is 58, but he likes to say he’s 60 because “it sounds ridiculous. Like, whore, I’m 60. He was born in 1968 in Athens to a Greek father and a Norwegian mother, and says he “grew up on Smash Hits”, a British pop magazine – which is why he admires 80s UK bands. He says: “I was on holiday in the summer and a Welsh girl who taught English to my cousins introduced me about Soft Cell. “Before I was listening to Raffaella Carrà and Donna Summer and the change was amazing. And Relax was a big hit on the Greek islands. (British people) came to Greece to drink a lot and dance to Relax, but it’s a song about sex in the time of Aids.”
His mother dreamed of becoming a civil engineer like his father, so he started studying architecture at the Greek polytechnic school before dropping out: at that time he was fascinated by the writings of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, while his teachers “were teaching us how to build houses but not why”. Inspired by the “break of a boy in California”, he went to the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1989, and immediately found himself in the middle of Los Angeles art. “The first scene I saw was Mike Kelly showing the dolls of a gallerist arguing with a collector, very different. Then I met Cathy Opie, Lari Pittman, Dennis Cooper. It was a great time.”
He completed his undergraduate studies, but his mother insisted that he get a master’s degree, so he went to New York to study at Columbia University. “It was the first university to introduce computers in architecture in 1994, the first paperless studio. Then I sat in the first digital studio of Keller Easterling”, architect and professor “who has written Extrastatecraft and all these books about urbanism which are very interesting”.
After graduating, the famous Swiss curator, Adelina von Fürstenberg, commissioned her first building – called the Pavilion – in 1996. Another artistic influence was fellow Greek artist Miltos Manetas. Together, the two began exploring the digital world.
“I got my first e-mail in ’94, and by the end of my degree I was making computer animations and putting things together,” Angelidakis says. “Architecture education gives you more tools than you would need for any other job – you have to know everything from the psychology of space to the construction of wooden planks. SCI-Arc was really an art school. And then with computers added to it, I suddenly had a lot of power. Miltos introduced me to the Internet and he got his first Mac. We became roommates.”
“I approached computers not as a tool, but a tool that made me think differently about the world,” Angelidakis continues. So when I would see my fellow students doing a marathon on the Internet, I would say, ‘Oh my God, the computers in different rooms are talking to each other!’ So I built houses in different places to communicate. I love it when technology is popular – it has real meaning. So I’m always on the lookout for viral technologies. “
He went through the world of art and architecture – when I asked him if he had ever built anything that he called “my house” – but in 2010, a combination of major life events forced him to change. First, his father died of cancer; his business went bankrupt in 1999, and the rest of the family bought his house, meaning that Angelikadis was dispossessed after his mother’s death. Angelidakis was later diagnosed with HIV. “Death, bankruptcy and HIV all within three months were high,” he says. “I was very unconscious, and I think that’s what forced me to become an artist and stop thinking of myself as an architect.” And two years later, my mother committed suicide, but because of her mental illness.
She was married to artist Angelo Plessas, but separated in 2021. “We are friends, we share a house and our dogs love each other,” she says. He has had exhibitions and participated in biennales around the world, the Greek pavilion being a top job. Although it’s one of the top brands Angelidakis seems to be busy with as a list of good candidates come to take his hand.
“What was I saying?” He asks me, fishing for another tip. “Do you remember? Do you want to?”
No, I’m fine, thanks.
“Why give up?” Angelidakis asks. “Try it.”
He also lights up, and talks about the protests against the participation of Russia and Israel in the biennale. “I think the national forums continue the original purpose of the biennale, which was the international agenda of the late 1800s,” he says. “And I’m afraid that when we criticize political things in the biennale, we are not talking to the system that causes the problem. That’s why I’m changing the work of the pavilion. It’s no longer a country, it’s a place of refuge. But of course, it’s a game, all of it. Science fiction and technology are what I love.”
And RuPaul’s Drag Race, I’m asking, I’m thinking about how the ballroom voice does its job. Yes, the artist replies, “because of how it’s changing the culture of today. RuPaul is like Malcolm X for gay kids.
Angelidakis says that even his biggest and most ambitious works are personal. “I’ve made projects that seem funny to people, but they were about my mother’s suicide,” he says, referring to the 2013 film he made called Troll, in which he imagines a building in Athens collapsing, is filled with plants and then decides to leave the city for a mountain. “Troll is a Norwegian thing, and it’s a house that goes and kills itself. So my work is very dark. It has to have Frankie Goes in Hollywood for people to dance to. Otherwise, you’re just going to be disappointed.”
The Venice Biennale is open until 22 November
