It has caused a sensation and queues are forming at the Greek Pavilion in Venice’s famous Giardini for Dryland representing Greece in the premier art event, with the support of Onassis Culture. It is an installation that brings to neighboring Italy the experience of the Greek festival, through the intermediary collective work, conceived by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yiannis Michalopoulos, with co-creators Elia Kalogiannis, Giorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Haikalis and Fotis Sagonas. The project draws inspiration from the experience of the local festivals of mainland Greece, and more specifically of Thessaly, but also of the wider area of Xiromeros in Etoloakarnania.
The sound of a bell welcoming the spectators to the venue, an agricultural irrigation machine in the center, video projections, televisions, led screens, dudukes, a sound console, white plastic chairs, posters of a great festival singer, testimonials regarding the festival printed on the wall. This is what the visitor faces at the Hellenic Pavilion, which is flooded with the sounds of bugles, farm car exhausts, marching motorcycles, festive songs and electronic music.
In the 20-minute projection loop, the viewer “visits” a festival that no one has ever been to, a quarry and the mountains of Xiromeros, while seeing spinning chandeliers, festival lights, water jets, plastic toys, 3D spinning objects and poster vans celebrations. The water running from the sprinkler is reflected on the concrete and everything changes dimensions. The visitor is invited to reconstruct the world of the work, to decode the elements according to his own experience and to make his personal journey of joy and loss.
The artists say regarding the conception of the work: “Between the festival, the underground clarinet, the field, the agricultural warehouse and the church are the lives, voices and imagination of the local musicians, but also of a whole world that goes along with it.
There are of course those, men, but mainly women, who stopped being part of this constantly renewing world… We traced the route from the center of a rural settlement to the edges of the agricultural landscape that surrounds it. We started from the square, where the celebration is set up, on the slabs and cement, from the festival and its economy, the working musicians and farmers, the poster, the tape, the electricity, the sound amplification, the space, the food, the children, the tree, the rain, the field, the tractor, the water, the watering machine, the soil, the cotton, the absence of a woman. In order to make this journey, several of us gathered, in the countryside, on the streets, in former industrial spaces, where we tested actions and materials, but also online, to discuss 3D models, since now all or some of the things that move us had to fit at the Greece pavilion in a way that leaves space free for the absence to speak… Guided by its sound and materiality, with Xiromero/Dryland we seek a multi-sensory experience, proposing an allegorical geography that hears the festival and sees the water ».
“The dance remains open”
The curator of the Hellenic Pavilion, Panos Giannikopoulos, notes: “In Xiromero/Dryland, pause and activation, center and periphery, action, reaction or inactivity are framed by the active gaze of the viewer who is invited to help stitch it together juxtaposed material. The project is the result of teamwork. Artists question the limits of participation, hierarchies, the context of production of a cultural product and its form, while trying to avoid a priori allocations of positions… There is no imitation, but an escape from interpretation, while the cultural object is reconstructed and the body functions as a vehicle for being there and dealing with the functional everyday world, overriding explanatory theories and closed systems of reference: dance remains open’.
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