192THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERinstallations, but a painstakingly accurate transposition of a shop origi-
nally situated in the Greek city of Volos. To be more accurate, the artist
has dismantled the entire business, piece by piece, and has relocated it in the
pavilion. Its original owner, Dimitris Ziogos, has worked there since 1947
and has owned it since 1975.^1 He is electronically represented in the in-
stallation via short films in which he recounts the ups and downs of the
business through the social, historical, political, and commercial rela-
tionships that defined the processing and trading of animal hides.
It soon appears clear that as a vestige of the past sociohistorical reali-
ties that once made Volos a vibrant town, the environment’s material
presence evokes a peculiar overlay of epistemic spatializations—the shop,
the mausoleum, the archive, the exhibiting space, the cabinet of curiosi-
ties, and the surrealist exhibit: this is a space in which the materiality of the
uncategorized, everyday objects on display holds the ability to connect
narratives and retrieve cultural milieus in which natureculture narra-
tives have intertwined for nearly a century. Here, the structure is archaeo-
logical and the backbone, ethnographic. The objects the shop contains
are sedimentations—strata of cultural imprints embedded in the material-
ity of magazines, postcards, newspaper cuttings, obsolete tools, furniture,
and animal skin. Papadimitriou’s artistic gesture, that of relocating the
shop/workshop in the realm of contemporary art, is a Duchampian one
in essence. The whole shop is a large readymade or, more accurately, an as-
semblage of readymades inscribing an anthropogenic chain of agency in
which humans, animals, geographies, materialities, and biodefining
economies become visible.
Back in Volos, the Agrimiká (agrimiká means wild animals) shop had
become a ruin (fig. 6.1). The owner predominantly kept it open as a place of
conversation for the locals to meet, discuss the present, and reminisce
about a better past. Now fully disentangled from its original utilitarian
network, the space, along with its contents, can be understood as a Heideg-
gerian object of the kind that no longer is ready-to-hand. According to
Heidegger’s tool analysis, as long as objects remain ready-to-hand and
therefore serve a practical function, they disappear to our conscious. These
objects are thus caught up in a paradox: they relentlessly withdraw in the
thin depths of their surfaces—the veneers. When functional purpose
fails, or when it is deliberately frustrated, a new awareness of objects can
emerge.^2 This is clearly the agential factor inscribed in Agrimiká, and most