"We deplore the categorical refusal by the British of Unesco's invitation to launch a mediation process over the Parthenon sculptures housed in the British Museum," the cultural minister had said.
Earlier this year, Xydakis roundly condemned the British Museum's decision rejecting a Unesco offer to help resolve the dispute more than 200 years after the sculptures were controversially removed from Athens' greatest temple, the Parthenon, by the seventh Earl of Elgin during his tenure as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
And bolstered by successive polls that have shown the vast majority of Britons to be in favour of repatriation it has put aside the issue of ownership, instead proposing joint curatorship of the sculptures through the establishment of a branch of the British Museum in Athens.
And then there are the sculptures made from matchboxes and bits of card.
Among the shortlisted artists exhibiting was a young man who made evanescent little sculptures – monkeys, rabbits, squirrels – out of the fluff he scratched up from a newly laid carpet using his fingernails.
"The road to reclaiming the return of the sculptures is diplomatic and political," he told Mega TV in a wide-ranging interview on Wednesday.
Past shows have featured the monolithic concrete and glass sculptures by Cristian Andersen; stop-motion nightmares from Cristóbal León; and installation, video and photographs from Katrina Daschner such as the sexually charged Murderess series featuring hooded, axe-wielding women in bleak, wintry forests.
"Diplomatic and political efforts have been tried since the mid-1980s and made very little progress," said Matthew Taylor, at the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.
As a result the piece I filed failed to contain the line: "For £8,000, the artist … said he would visit a patron's home, lay a new piece of carpet, scrape away and mould personalised sculptures".
Even though they look complicated, himmeli sculptures are easy to make.
We would love to see what you come up with, so please share pictures of your himmeli sculptures with via GuardianWitness – just click on the blue button.
