The Blissful have no Past

Anyone who has walked along Fokionos Negri Street in Athens is unlikely not to have noticed one of the most unusual statues in the public space of Athens, the Greyhound, a life-size marble dog lying on its hind legs with its chest raised. It is not only the subject of this charming sculpture that is surprising, but also the whole pose of the dog, which gives the impression that it is ready to charge forward: In a city dominated by the rigid cult of heroism, the agony of national identity and the illusion of aesthetic continuity with Ancient Greece, the statue converses with the joyful everyday life of passers-by walking their dogs, with the tenderness shared by those of us who live with animals, with the real body of dogs around running, playing and defecating. In an Athens teetering between muffled history and, now, dehumanized touristification, Greyhound brings to the surface of the city a present so emotionally charged that I sometimes get the feeling that it hides a mourning. Is it in fact a tribute to a lost companion?

The sculptor of this statue on the margins of the city’s monumental, heroic sculpture is Euripides Vavouris, who also stands on the margins of Greek art history. Born in the city of Argos in 1911, he became (or he became not) known as the predominantly Greek animalier, that is, a sculptor primarily of animals. One could say that Vavouris belongs to a neglected, mainly literary, narrative tradition, but one that has nevertheless produced masterpieces in Greece: animals for this tradition were not just the familiar “tools” of rural life. They were the familiar Other whose sufferings reflect the discomfort of a society struggling in a modernity imposed from above.

Maria Tsagkari in the sound documentary The Blissful have no Past unfolds the threads of Vavouris’ biography and his relationship with animals. Tsagkari’s audio documentary is part of the exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives at the EMΣT and can be heard either at the Museum or next to the Greyhound on Fokionos Negri Street.

Sound documentary, duration 33’
Written & conceived by Maria Tsagkari
Original Music by Κ.ΒΗΤΑ
Narrated by Blaine L. Reininger | Sound editing & mixing by Leandros Νtounis
Commissioned and produced by ΕMΣΤ | Νational Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens

Courtesy of the artist
Special thanks to Marilena Vavouri and the Estate of Euripides Vavouris

Tsagkari’s work is part of the exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives on view at ΕΜΣΤ from 16.05-25 – 15.02.26