News dal Padiglione Grecia

Left: Greek Pavilion, Digital rendering © Korres Engineering | Right: Greek Pavilion, Digital rendering © Korres Engineering

At the Greek Pavilion artist and filmmaker Loukia Alavanou invites her audience on a journey through time that unfolds along the themes of aging and dying, human dignity and universal freedom, artistic vision and the present social reality. The core of her installation Oedipus in Search of Colonus is a 15-minute film shot with virtual reality, which transposes an almost 2,500-year-old drama by the famous playwright Sophocles into the present and even looks to the future.

On a formal level, Oedipus in Search of Colonus also tries to connect people through architecture, while playing on the theme of isolation, which is necessary for the viewing of the VR film. Within the Greek Pavilion, Alavanou constructs four hemispherical domes of different sizes in accordance with a design by the Athens avant-garde architecture office AREA and the designer Dimitris Korres. These domes consist of an aluminium framework that is spanned with sound-absorbent material on the inside. Their form plays on the antique Pantheon and also on the geodesic domes of the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller, thus drawing a conceptual arc that extends from antiquity to the futuristic realm of Takis Zenetos. The 15 seats for the public are also inspired by Zenetos, resulting in a unique hybrid between a television armchair and desk chair.