A true artist's book, the catalogue for the Greek Pavilion by Andrea Angelidakis, an exercise in speculative storytelling which offers a non-linear historical account from 1934 (the year the pavilion was built) to today.
Escape Manual is Andreas Angelidakis' exhibition catalogue for the 61st Biennale di Venezia. The book presents an elaborate visual archive of the artist's research and sketches materialising into Escape Room, his immersive installation for the Greek Pavilion. Featuring original collages and texts, the research is queered into a personal narrative articulated through the perspective of Grecia, the pavilion personified.
Through layers of historical documents, magazines, renders, photos, and screenshots, the book explores the tension of national pavilions as a typology at the intersection of art, politics, and architecture. Occupying the space between a diary, a school reader, and a coming-of-age story, Escape Manual is an exercise in speculative storytelling, offering a non-linear historical account from 1934—the year of the pavilion's construction—to this day.
Andreas Angelidakis (born 1968 in Athens) is an architect and artist based in Athens. He studied architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and subsequently at Columbia University in New York. His artistic practice is informed by a vibrant interdisciplinary engagement spanning architecture, publications, writing, design, and exhibition-making. His work materialises at the threshold between the real and the virtual, historical memory and fiction, sincerity and humour, constructing new narrative environments that propose new modes of experiencing and inhabiting the contemporary cultural and digital condition. In his conceptual cosmos, architecture operates more broadly as a vehicle for exploring identity, while Athens and the notion of the ruin—ancient, modern, or digital—recur as constant and critical motifs throughout his artistic output. From installation to essays, each work distils his ongoing inquiry into the relationship between viewer and artwork, foregrounding the interplay of power, space, and infrastructure through idiosyncratic visual systems that privilege embodied experiences within digital states.
Complementary to his artistic output but by no means a satellite endeavour, Angelidakis has demonstrated a consistent presence and track record in various strands of the art world. His interventions in public space in the framework of international contemporary art events operate as spatial punctuations and decompression zones, responsive to their sites while critically engaging the institutional and political frameworks that shape them. For his ventures into the curatorial discipline, he treats each exhibition as an autonomous artistic event, constructing distinct mythologies and discursive environments that oscillate between the personal and the collective. His publishing activity—encompassing self-published initiatives, artist books, monographs, editorial projects, and exhibition catalogues—forms an integral extension of his practice rather than a parallel expedition. As a testament to the international recognition of his work in architecture, art, and curating, Angelidakis has lectured widely at various universities and art institutions around the globe, and his work has been featured in leading international art publications and media, including Artforum, Frieze, e-flux, RIBA Journal, Nowness, Financial Times, Art Pulse, Archinect, Architectural Record, The New Yorker, Art in America, ArtReview, La Repubblica, Flash Art, Dezeen, Designboom, Wallpaper, ARTnews, and The Art Newspaper, among others.
