“Xirómero/Dryland” Pavillion of Greece at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, powered by Onassis Culture

The research behind the “Xirómero/Dryland” project that will represent Greece in the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia was realized by multimedia artist and composer Thanasis Deligiannis and playwright and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos as Onassis AiR Fellows in the framework of the Margaroni Residency and under a commission by Onassis Culture. Deligiannis and Michalopoulos assembled the creative team that further included visual artist and cinematographer Elia Kalogianni, photographer and documentary artist Yorgos Kyvernitis, sound engineer and designer Kostas Chaikalis, and visual artist and architect Fotis Sagonas. Other artistic collaborators are Fotini Papachristopoulou, Vassiliki-Maria Plavou, and Marios Stamatis.

The artists mention: “Between the traditional feast, the basement joints blasting with clarinets (the so-called ‘klarina’), the field, the agricultural warehouse, and the church lie the lives, voices, and imagination of traditional musicians, as well as an entire world that goes hand in hand. There are, of course, those men, but mostly women, who have ceased to be a part of this ever-updating world. After all, their centrifugal path has defined our endeavor’s outline. Its substratum is the experiences and memories of one of us, who, as a child, watched and listened to the feast at night from afar and other times rested on the hose of a watering machine while it was being unrolled in a field in the Thessalian plain. With these thoughts in mind and the primary intention of setting an open process of artistic research in motion, we began in Margaroni Residency exploring the human experience of absence and presence in the ecosystem forged by the Greek ‘panighíri’ (feast). We traced the route from the center of a rural village to the outskirts of the agricultural landscape surrounding it. We began from the village’s square, where the feast is initially set up, over the slabs and cement, from the feast and its economy, its working musicians and farmers, the poster, the cassette, the electricity, the sound amplification, the space, the food, the children, the tree, the rain, the field, the tractor, water, the watering machine, the soil, the cotton, and the absence of a woman. To make this journey possible, quite a few of us have gathered in the province, on the streets, and in former industrial spaces, where we tried out actions and materials, but also convened online, discussing 3D models, as we needed to include all or some of those elements that have an emotional value for us in the Greek Pavilion in a way that leaves an open space for absence to speak. In relation to the aesthetic treatment of the objects that make up the installation—a gesture of unmediated performativity nonetheless—the significance of the overall composition is accentuated: the interior of a building shell resembling externally a church that has perished its dome and has lost all its wall iconography recalls now a rural warehouse, where the agricultural irrigation equipment now dispels the agony of national representations. A shift of perspective between dominant and marginalized cultural subjects takes place, which seems to open up a liminal space for the articulation of new meanings. Driven by sound and materiality, we seek in ‘Xirómero/Dryland’ a multisensory experience, suggesting an allegoric geography that listens to the feast and sees the water.”

The curator of the Greek Pavilion, Panos Giannikopoulos, notes: “In ‘Xirómero/Dryland,’ pause and activation, the center and the periphery, action, reaction, or inertia are framed by the animated gaze of the viewer who is invited to contribute to the collation of the juxtaposed material. As such, the work is the outcome of a collective effort. The artists wonder about the limits of participation, hierarchies, the context of production, as well as the form of an artistic product while they try to evade beforehand any distribution of positions. The grid that sustains the distinction between mind and body, subject and object, is disrupted, while sensory experience surpasses mental function. Artistic practice in itself does not cater to pure categorizations, succeeding as such to dismantle and further merge cultural fields. High and low, artistic performance and the feast, theater and visual arts, entertainment, fiction and documentation, and grief; all seem to get together. There is no mimicry taking place, only an escape from interpretation, while the cultural object is reconstructed and the body functions as a vehicle to remain present and face the functional everyday world, prevailing over exegetic theories and closed reference systems; the dance is still on.”