In the context of the 56th International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale, Outset Greece supported the artist Maria Papadimitriou who represented Greece with the project 'AGRIMIKA - Why look at animals?'.
Maria Papadimitriouís installation was a shop, a vestige of the past, that sold animal hides and leather, transferred from Volos to the central but ruined landscape of Greek pavilion. The AGRIMIKA are animals that coexist with humans, but resist domestication.
We, humans, see in animals the reflection of our own features, behaviours, and manners. This awareness permits separation by contrasting the human with the animalistic. As the beast ends up as embodying the divergence from the human norm, the image of a democratic society is deconstructed, and part of it degraded: rights no longer exist for all and in the same measure.
This presentation of the relationship of humans and animals becomes a contemporary allegory of the dispossessed and the resistant and sparks concerns ranging from politics and history to economics and traditions, ethics and aesthetics, fear of the foreign and the incomprehensible.
Commissioner: Hellenic Minister of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs
