Set in the central Athenian meat market, Varvakeios Agora, the project explores the complex topics of globalisation, nationalism, and culture in the context of traditional food chains.

Southern Europe is characterised by short, traditional food chains, where the origin of a food product is the main way of determining that product’s quality. With the rise of technology that origin becomes increasingly harder to evaluate and has led to the rise of gastro-nationalism.

In this context, the project theorises a near future where synthetic food has become the norm, and it is now impossible to assign any symbolic quality to a food product using its origin. The project predicts a social over-reaction and a turn to ‘auto-cannibalism’ – the consumption of synthetic human meat – the ultimate shortening of the food chain, where the producer literally becomes the product.

A market for ‘humain’ is built within the Varvakeios Agora through the cannibalisation of Athens’s classical disused buildings, creating an architecture of decontextualised building fragments that is an echo of Greece’s marbles still resting in the British Museum.