Greece - Biennale Arte 2015

Maria Papadimitriou’s installation, Why Look at Animals? AGRIMIKÁ is a shop, a vestige of the past that sells animal hides and leather, transferred from the central Greek city of Volos, where it operates. This presentation of the relationship of humans to animals sparks series of concerns ranging from politics and history to economics and traditions, ethics and aesthetics, fear of the foreign and the incomprehensible, and our profound anthropocentrism that allows us to define ourselves as non-wild, different from all other animals.

The pavilion creates the context that charges and reveals this spatial “espace trouvé”. In the “ruined” landscape of the Greek pavilion, the non-domesticate-able animals – the agrimiká – become the vehicle for a contemporary allegory of the dispossessed, and attempts to galvanize our instinctive resistance to the decadence that surrounds us.