It’s Sunday in the village. Every week, the Greek state broadcaster sends a camera crew to record the harvest festivals, crochet-making displays, and wedding rituals of a rural locality. The programme has been running for decades. The nation’s hamlets anxiously wait their turn in the spotlight, knowing that the camera can turn milk maids and grocers into celebrities. Each wants to showcase their custom, more ‘diverse’ than in a contemporary art curator’s wet dream.

But it is wet and dark in Xirómero. Arriving on location in this Western Greek region, the crew found the pavilion deserted. A sound and light show synced with the movement of agricultural equipment makes for an eerie trace of past revelries which still play out on screen installations, posters, and stacks of plastic garden chairs. The famous Greek hospitality has turned into dystopia, sustained only by tricks of technology.

This display is aesthetically rich and pleasurably hard to parse. Recent Greek pavilions lamented the nation’s financial and political woes, which were in part caused by the very ideologies that now try to ‘diversity’ the OG city-state. If the Hellenic Republic tried to find the ‘foreign’ in Wester’s civilisation’s cradle as per this Biennale’s dictum, it drew a blank and missed even itself.