Andreas Angelidakis

I find it difficult, I say to him from our shared perch, to reconcile the playful, open and democratic scenario in front of us with the news that a gallery elsewhere at the fair yesterday sold a painting for $20 million. Isn’t it strange that these two visions of what art can be – socially engaged practice and a loosely regulated market for the superrich – can belong to the same creative economy?

“I don’t know,” he says with a wry smile that will become familiar, “if I necessarily consider myself to be an artist.”

This isn’t totally unexpected, considering that Angelidakis has in the past preferred to describe himself as an “architect who doesn’t build.” But it’s still an unusual sentiment to hear at a fair which has as its express purpose to sell objects by artists, however it clothes its commercialism in the fig leaf of programmes dedicated to more experimental projects. Has he told his gallery?

He laughs, and as we talk about why he is uncomfortable with these labels, a group of smartly dressed young collectors congregates around a stack of the veined, pink-skinned building blocks. One pushes tentatively at the tower, causing it to totter and fall. The posse squeal and scatter as if fleeing the scene of a crime, thus perfectly missing the point that the child had intuitively grasped. I tell Angelidakis how much I hate these people. “The idea that you can touch a work of art, that you can make something yourself,” he shrugs, “it drives them a bit crazy, you know?”

This fanfare is provided by Angelidakis’s dog, a minor local celebrity in his own right. In defiance of his name, Lupo is an overstimulated Pomeranian memein- waiting with the button nose of a porcelain doll, a fixed expression of elated surprise and a barely suppressed mean streak. As I wonder how a creature who appears to be nine-tenths fluffball can survive the Athenian summer, we take a clattering lift to a fourth-floor flat whose interior combines orientalist fantasy with postmodern design and colourful African furnishings, a satisfying combination of disparate elements which strikes me as characteristic of Angelidakis’s aesthetic.

One wall is occupied by a faded tapestry depicting an idyllic sylvan scene, loosely framed by a dangle of blinking fairy lights. “As you can see, we are very minimalist,” he deadpans, after introducing me to his partner, the celebrated artist Angelo Plessas. While Angelidakis is at once generous and guarded – his tendency to use humour to deflect a line of enquiry only partially concealing the impression that he would not suffer fools gladly – Plessas radiates calm and conviviality. He is also observant: tilting his head to one side, he asks me in his lilting English, without seeming to pass judgement, whether I need a glass of water.

We move onto a balcony hedged with tall ferns, palm trees and potted birds of paradise. Angelidakis drapes tobacco over a pink cigarette paper, twisting it with a flourish into a lightly packed cylinder, as Plessas retreats to the kitchen to prepare what he promises will be a simple, low-carb lunch.

“My dad was a civil engineer,” Angelidakis says to me, by way of explaining how he became interested in architecture, “and so I would go with him to building sites. I was fascinated by these unfinished buildings that could become anything. On the streets, I was always trying to understand what I saw. I wanted to make things with what surrounded me.” Yet, studying architecture in Greece, he became frustrated that “we were taught how to design buildings but not why” (he had been reading the theories of Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid at the time). So in 1989 he moved to California to study in the radical architecture school SCI-Arc, where the artist Jim Isermann and his then partner, David Hargrove, took him under their wing and introduced him to the now-legendary local art scene. He saw Mike Kelley perform hand puppetry (“a collector on one hand and a gallerist on the other, bitching at each other”); he contributed to the first of Jim Shaw’s famous thrift store paintings; he purchased a camera from Catherine Opie.

He was immediately attracted to the freedom these artists enjoyed from the constraints that often limit an architect: the compromises made inevitable by the whims of a commissioning body, the permissions of local authorities, the unreliability of contractors, and the prohibitively small budgets. “Rather than having to endlessly explain themselves,” he tells me, “artists could just place an object somewhere. Or make a work and take the risk of having it speak for itself.”

Having graduated top of his class, he moved to New York to study at Columbia under the influential architect Keller Easterling. Living in the city on and off until 2005, Angelidakis built a reputation for work that explored the concept of ruins, with a particular focus on the internet and the changes it was beginning to effect in the way that people think and act (as a student he was part of the first class in the world to work in a “paperless” – meaning fully computerised – studio, a headfuck he describes as “like asking people now to design buildings using telepathy”). Those interests were combined in architectural fantasies that, instead of being constructed in bricks and mortar, were accessed through the internet or realised as animations.

Plessas calls us to the kitchen, where we sit round a small table on seats upholstered in colourful batik patterns. As he gently scolds Lupo for attempting to raid the table-top chicken, Angelidakis explains that they tried once to have him trained, but were told that Lupo would never take orders unless he was confident of being rewarded with a treat. “We soon realised that we didn’t want a disciplined dog,” Angelidakis says with discernible pride. “Who wants a dog to behave itself, anyway?”

We talk about Documenta 14, the international exhibition to which both Angelidakis and Plessas contributed when it came to Athens in 2017, and on which I worked in an editorial role under the writer Quinn Latimer, who lives around the corner. The public programme – conceived by curator Paul B. Preciado as “a space for cultural activism” when Europe was “in ruins” – took place in a hall for which Angelidakis designed seating that could (as in Basel) be reconfigured to suit activities from a knitting workshop to an introduction to black internationalism. Plessas coordinated the Noospheric Society, whose meetings focused on contemplation and included an exercise in tantric massage (suffice to say that the building’s doors had to be locked for the duration of the session).

Both are interested in how bodies or buildings can be both civil, in the sense of working as a collective, and disobedient, in the sense of transgressing convention. Speaking about his devotion to Athens, Angelidakis tells me how he tends to “attach emotions to objects” and to invest buildings – not only the ones he invents, but those he lives in and around – with stories. Noting that my glass is placed precariously close to the edge of the table, he says: “You know, when I see that glass I wonder…is it scared?”

I’d been several times to Athens in the past couple of years, but never paid any attention to the many bright pink doorways in this part of the city until an artist, whose work draws attention to its inequalities, told me that they mark out the brothels that have proliferated since the economic and migrant crises. “Buildings have personas,” Angelidakis says.

“They tell you things.” And I’m reminded that you can’t begin to understand a city until you learn how to read its streets, walls and houses.

Buildings also tell you stories about the people who made them. Angelidakis’s work has explored the possibilities of the “post-ruin” (the title given to his work in Basel), and the different ways in which ideas and materials can be repurposed to create new structures and systems (whether physical, theoretical or social). This preoccupation with collapse is often linked to the effects on Greek society of the sovereign debt crisis that erupted in 2009. There are obvious (and, to a critic, attractively neat) parallels between his ruined architectures and a disintegrating society, but, he says, “it was much more about personal crisis. In the space of a couple of years around that time, my parents died, their house was foreclosed and I was diagnosed with HIV. I guess I could read myself into the crisis that was going on in the whole city.”

Angelidakis says that he came to wonder whether the impulse to speak “through” his buildings might have emerged from his experience, as a young child, “of beginning to understand that, according to society, there was something ‘wrong’ with me.” He remembers going to kindergarten and wondering if the other children would notice that he was somehow set apart, and how the pressure to internalise those feelings led him – as he came to terms with his sexuality in the course of his adolescence – to “transition from a sassy child to morose teenager.” By transforming these emotions, or by projecting them onto the buildings and landscapes he was designing, he was better able to process and to protect that felt sense of difference.

Among the things he realised were “wrong” with him as a child was his being equally fascinated by LEGO bricks and Barbie dolls. It’s a clash that immediately brings to mind one of the works he exhibited at The Breeder: building blocks arranged as a Roman arch and spangled by disco lights. And indeed, the creativity that Angelidakis preaches and practices seems premised on the principle of being “wrong,” in the sense of queering conventional readings and undermining established authority. When he was lecturing at architecture school, he says, he spent a long time teaching the value of mistakes to students who were eager to do things the right way.

The implication is that, if you insist on making things the “right” way, then you can only make copies of what already exists: tasteful but unoriginal things which fit into conventional schemes. So perhaps art – to go back to the discussion we started on that soft bench in Basel – is something closer to an attitude, a way of thinking and engaging with the world? Angelidakis takes a moment to consider this.’

I take this at first to mean that galleries are filled with decorative or derivate objects which, for commercial reasons, are “elevated” to the status of art. But it occurs to me, as Angelidakis rolls another pink-skinned cigarette, that he might mean the opposite. That galleries might be filled with objects and ideas that are masquerading as art only because there’s no other place for them. They are, in fact, displaced works of architecture, or literature, or music, cast out of their natural home by hostile political or economic circumstances. And that perhaps those objects and ideas are better than art, in the received sense of the word.

He pauses, giving me time to worry if it was only the tsipouro speaking, before responding:

“The only thing I know is that art should be really expensive.”

And he laughs, really hard.