The Margaroni Residency (2022 & 2023) was initiated and directed by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos as Onassis Culture Fellows through the Onassis AiR program. This custom-tailored residency generated the research, artistic material, and conceptual core for Xirómero/Dryland, presented at the Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2024, and Nightwater, presented at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam in 2025. It continues as an evolving body of artistic research that takes on different forms, recomposed in relation to each space in which it is presented.
Through the Margaroni Residency, our objective was to study the music culture across the Greek countryside, while offering a novel understanding of its evolution and reception in the 1970s and 1980s. By revisiting the life of the folk singer Kiki Margaroni as a case study, and through the creative assembly of multimedia material, we conducted fieldwork focused on the regions of Xirómero and Thessaly. We recorded audio and filmed rural feasts and agricultural landscapes, musicians and farmers, while observing and tooking notes. Through the gathering of this material on location and its reassembly in workshops in Athens, we suggested artistic responses to questions around the position of the female body in such societies, the patterns of seasonal work in folk music and agriculture, and the rural landscape of the periphery in relation to the urban centre.
To support our research method, a phase of open experimentation became necessary. Working inside buildings awaiting transformation, such as emptied-out ex-industrial spaces, we explored how this material could inhabit these sites, carrying sounds, images, objects, unexpected connections, and absences. We have been developing a site-specific, peripatetic experience that can be reconfigured in each new space as an ephemeral event. It takes a hybrid form, combining musical performance, visual installation, laboratory practice, and documentary elements.
The Margaroni Residency gave birth to a vast archive of field recordings, interviews, performative workshops, and immersive tryouts. We had the chance to explore these hybrid forms in two different phases, which led to two large-scale tryouts in Athens. The first phase took place in a building on Legaki Street (Renti, Athens), and the second in a building on Ydras Street (Moschato, Athens).
Timeline
Preparing the adventure (February-June 2022)
The field recordings (July-August 2022)
Workshop A | Legaki building (November-December 2022)
The carnival (February 2023)
Studio work (March 2023)
Workshop B | Ydras building (April-May 2023)
Roaming the countryside (August 2023)
Presentation at the Onassis AiR Open Days & Workshop for professionals (October 2023)
In a condition of transition between enclosed and open space, fragments of memories or meanings are arranged in layers. They are installed in any room that could be transformed into a performance venue, whether it is an industrial monumental building or a traditional theatre or concert hall.
This immersive event is built in each new site it takes place in, it is presented, subsequently dismantled, and then disappears to travel elsewhere, like the panighíri, the traditional Greek country fair.
photo credits: Pinelopi Gerosimou & Yorgos Kyvernitis
The Margaroni Residency workforce
Thanasis Deligiannis & Yannis Michalopoulos – directors
Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis, Fotini Papachristopoulou – artistic collaborators
Natasa Tsakiridou, Lina Alatzidou, Dafni Nikolaou, Christina Kemanetzidou – singers
Spyros Rakis Nikolaou – clarinet, Yannis Zarias, Christos Dalianis – violin, Dimitris Tigkas – double bass, Stamatis Passopoulos – keyboard
Sofia Karakantza, Miranda Terzopoulou, Tasos Koukoutas, Jeph Vanger – artistic consultants
Stavros Nikolakopoulos – technical director
Konstantinos Margkas – lighting engineer
Danai Belosinof – production assistant for I/O
Frank van der Weij – project development
Produced by I/O
Production companies in Greece that collaborated with I/O:
Lefou productions (Legaki workshop)
TooFarEast (Ydras workshop)
With the production and technical support of the Onassis Stegi.
Onassis Culture Fellowship / Onassis AiR program.
Related links:
Onassis AiR page
I/O page with photographic footage
Lifo: in-depth article on the residency (GR)
