Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos: Margaroni Residency

Pinelopi Gerasimou

Between the traditional feasts of the countryside, the basement joints blasting with Greek folk clarinets (the so-called ‘klarina’) and the nightclubs of Athens, lay the lives, voices and imagination of traditional musicians, as well as an entire world that goes hand in hand. How does the Greek traditional feast evolve though through the years? Transdisciplinary artist, director and composer Thanasis Deligiannis and playwright and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos initiated ‘Margaroni Residency’ in June of 2022.

“Exploring the intention, as well as the very gesture of expression itself, we began by testing the functions of each material by itself and in combination with the others. In the light of this new condition, we revisit the older, as well as the recent recollections from the province, the feast, and the agricultural landscape."

Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos

Through this research project, their objective is to study the musical culture across the Greek periphery but offer a novel understanding as well of its development and acceptance in the 1970s and 1980s.

By revisiting the life of a female folk singer as their case study, Kiki Margaroni, the name of whom gave its title to the residency, they started a creative assembly of multimedia material, by conducting field trips to Xiromero and Thessaly. They recorded, filmed, seeked, found and suggested answers to questions around the position of woman, the patterns of seasonal work, and the rural landscape of the peripheral regions. Following the special feast that they set up with ENA ENA in the Exhibition Hall -1 of the Onassis Stegi in November of 2021, the artists and researchers return as Onassis AiR Fellows for a residency program until May 2023.

Over the course of November 2022, the creative team of Margaroni Residency ‘inhabited’ the building at Legaki Street; a large industrial space awaiting renovation. Following the research they conducted across Aetolia-Acarnania, Thessaly, and Preveza and with the input of a broadened team of collaborators, they set out to classify and explore the material they collected during their summer expeditions.

Video, interviews, photographs, field recordings, maps, books, records, cassettes, construction materials, and an agricultural machine, were installed in the space of the Legaki building, in order to reveal through hands-on test runs and experimental actions their common dynamics.

The experience and intentions of the creative team entered into a dialogue with the expressive capacities of a team comprised of artists and theorists and put to the test fragments of the assorted material, in an initial attempt to synthesize them through stage actions, sequences of sound, video installations, discussions, etc.

Yorgos Kyvernitis

After visiting carnival customs in Northern Greece in February of 2023, the two artists-in-residence designed a second large-scale workshop which would conclude the Margaroni Residency. Throughout April and May, they “inhabited” once again another ex-industrial space - the building at Ydras street. There, the entire team spent weeks on reassembling the findings of the first workshop, conducting new artistic tests and generating new material, as the artists’ experimentation on hybrid formats continued: immersiveness, performativity, music and sound design, composition and dramaturgy, installation, site-specificity, the element of documentary.