DEMOS: Andreas Angelidakis

Explore Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis’ ongoing installation project, DEMOS.

The formation of these light-weight blocks will change throughout the exhibition run – the structures may form a seat, a stage, a study space, a wall, a monument, an archway, or even a ruin. Revisiting this concept in our current context, Angelidakis thinks through how we create community and inhabit space in a global pandemic.

DEMOS (Sandstone) approaches architectural and colonial legacies through satire; the physical elements of the works gesture to antiquity – timelesss sandstone and concrete slabs – but are in fact light enough to lift. While intrinsically about Greece and Athenian foundations of democracy, where some citizens were allowed to speak and vote, DEMOS disrupts this legacy. The work is also about everywhere else simultaneously; the spread of failed democracy, the borderless flattening of the internet, the human body; and futures in ruin through climate change and resource scarcity. DEMOS (Sandstone) is symbolic for collaboration, as the inherent nature of ‘working-together’ is required in order to build a space that works for a temporary community.

This practice radically rethinks democratic sculpture in art and architecture. Inhabiting these structures highlights Angelidakis’ interest in “unofficial architecture” that is built by the people, for the people.