Season 2022 - 2023 at Onassis Stegi

"Bridge Over Troubled Water"

By setting it down again and again – saying it many times over too – will it come to pass? By spouting all the latest upbeat buzzwords – “happiness is a choice”, that sort of thing – while everything’s kicking off, in our neighborhoods and for the planet, will we achieve anything?

What can we do when positive thinking isn’t enough to make everything run smooth? When “History has its ups and downs, you know?” just isn’t enough.

What can art possibly do for anyone? Quite a lot, as it turns out. When it comes, that is, to artforms and artist-healers that refuse to coddle us yet bring us comfort. That unite us somehow but trouble us too. That beguile us somehow yet unveil us all the while. That manage somehow to toy with our emotional temperature.

The Onassis Stegi team are together forging stories, meeting strangers and making them friends, drawing connections – at times instinctively, at others quite consciously – between people and ideas, invigorating situations and shaking our minds free to do things that have meaning. Here we are, singing inside the Matchbox, dancing on psychedelic rugs, each inside our very own House of Trouble, roaring “I am a woman, not a fool”, losing ourselves in techno-shamanism, and seeking out the punishment that can efface the crime before feeling furiously moved by the words and the years we’ve lost.

Slipping the limits of Syngrou Avenue to dream inside building sites on Patission Street and in Votanikos, piling into cars, loading up their trunks and heading off to Ioannina and the mountain peaks of Crete, to Drama and Thessaloniki, to the islands of Tinos and Kefalonia, and to feast day celebrations in Xirokampos.

Listening to ideas springing from open, curious minds that want to learn all about paganistic masks and the Anastenaria fire-walkers, to hear tell of traditional Greek music in Konitsa from the mouth of an American, to find out what happened to Kiki Margaroni.

Yet others are telling their stories through film, about a train journey to Velestino, about women battling injustice and others battling to become mothers, films about joyous highs and crashing lows.

And from there we’re off to a muddled America, placing Cavafy in the hands of artists we wholeheartedly admire, reaching up into outer space from our basement space in Olympic Tower as an 18-year-old from Athens plays his music for rappers in Atlanta.

Throughout this journey, we want to be like a bridge over troubled water.

And when we manage this, to lay us down – well, how wonderful that is.

• Afroditi Panagiotakou, Director of Culture, Onassis Foundation