Venice Biennale | 60th International Art Exhibition
April-November 2024, Giardini, Greek Pavilion

Xirómero/Dryland is an interdisciplinary collective work conceived by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos, created along with the artists Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas. It represented Greece at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2024. Rooted in long-term artistic research on rural culture, it unfolds throughout the pavilion as a continuous composition in time and space, combining sound, video, light, water and mechanical systems, with an agricultural irrigation machine cueing its audiovisual elements as it is put in motion.

This page offers an extensive account of the project, from its development and artistic approach to its spatial and sonic construction, technical realisation, and audience and critical reception.

Xirómero/Dryland is conceived as an immersive installation that fuses together its varied elements – an agricultural irrigation machine and found objects; sound, video, light, and all the equipment these entail (speakers, monitors, luminaires, and so on) – into a singular whole, intersecting as well with the building of the Greek Pavilion itself. It enters into discourse with agricultural environments, technological impacts, cultural otherness and the very walls of the pavilion to generate a multisensorial experience.

The artists chart a course from the heart of a countryside settlement out to the very fringes of the rural landscape that surrounds it, encountering public squares and concrete expanses, the panighíri (Greek rural feast) and its associated economy, musicians and farmers at work, fly-posters and audio cassettes, electric power and amplified sound, food and dancing, children and trees, farmland and tractors and rain, watering machines, soil and cotton crops, and the absence of a woman along the way.

Xirómero/Dryland composes a hybrid reality, putting together fragments from different parts of rural Greece; from the mountainous and arid Xirómero to the large fertile plains of Thessaly, and from the legendary region of Kalavryta in the Peloponnese to the villages around the town of Arta in Epirus. The mountains of Xirómero and the plains of Thessaly have as many contrasts as similarities: limited tourism, a vivid folk culture, panighíria with heavy, slow music, stories of feasts that could end in rough fights, and farmers trying to cope with economic difficulties and the climate crisis.

Visitors enter the work at any point in its recurring cycle and move through an installation that unfolds around them rather than from a single viewpoint. Events overlap across the pavilion, appear from different directions and distances, or remain audible after they have disappeared from sight. The work is encountered gradually, through shifting combinations of movement, sound, image and space that each visitor assembles differently over time.

→ See the Installation photo gallery

Composing the installation

The following chapters look more closely at the artistic principles of Xirómero/Dryland: how composition, rather than the juxtaposition of disciplines, governs the work; how the irrigation machine becomes its central moving body and conductor of the installation’s events; how listening shapes its organisation in space and time; and how the Greek Pavilion itself becomes part of the composition.

Xirómero/Dryland was conceived as a single composition. Sound, image, light, machinery, objects and architecture were all developed in relation to the work as a whole. A decision made in one area can directly affect another. A mechanical possibility may alter the dramaturgy, a spatial choice can reshape the sound, or a technical limitation can lead to a new direction. What matters is how each decision integrates into the larger structure.

This approach depends on close exchange between artistic ideas and specialised knowledge. Questions concerning the behaviour of an object, the timing of an event or the interaction between two elements can move back and forth between artistic and technical conversations. Engineering, sound, light and moving image therefore evolve simultaneously, with several systems acting together in real time.

A large part of the composition takes shape through objects that already have their own functions. The irrigation machine continues to operate mechanically while becoming part of the installation’s temporal and spatial organisation. A screen remains a screen when the projection turns off, when it enters into dialogue with the pavilion, or when mobile parts of the installation cross its physical presence. A loudspeaker can become a moving source in space. One event can therefore unfold simultaneously through several disciplines, with meaning emerging from the way these functions intersect.

The team brought together backgrounds in composition and sound design, dramaturgy, cinematography and visual arts, architecture and engineering, alongside anthropological and ethnographic methods. Performance and directing tools were equally important: performative action, duration, behaviour, spatial organisation and the sequencing of events offered ways of bringing these forms of knowledge together within one structure. Collaboration could therefore move across areas of expertise without breaking the installation into separate disciplinary parts.

At the centre of Xirómero/Dryland stands a hose-reel irrigation machine, brought into the pavilion largely as it is. Its agricultural identity remains immediately present, while parts of its normal function are shifted through its placement, modification and connection to the rest of the installation. In agricultural use, the machine stretches a long hose across a field and gradually reels it back towards its main body, drawing the sprinkler cannon with it. Water, distance, movement and duration are already embedded in this operation. Inside the pavilion, these characteristics become intertwined with the artistic thinking of the work.

Sensors follow the machine’s rotation and the changing state of its mechanism. These readings are translated into signals that communicate with the audiovisual system, allowing the machine’s movement to trigger or influence sound, moving image and light. Its rotation, the gradual lifting of the cannon and its eventual fall onto the pavilion floor therefore become part of the installation’s score. In this sense, the machine functions as a conductor of the work.

The machine is also part of the sound composition itself. Its mechanics remain audible, microphones capture and extend parts of its functioning, and speakers are incorporated into its body. A horn attached to the sprinkler cannon turns with the machine, transforming the point from which water would normally be projected into a moving source of sound. Its acoustic sound can blend with its amplified and electronically processed versions, allowing the machine to be heard simultaneously as a physical mechanism and as part of the composed sound world.

Its mechanics give the machine a strong bodily presence. The movement of the large central reel was conceived in relation to the body of a dancer making a turn at a Greek feast: its rotation carries visible weight, balance and effort. Another bodily rhythm comes from the hydraulic system. A flexible rubber bladder expands and contracts with changes in pressure, connected to a mechanism that farmers call the machine’s “lung.” This breathing produces a periodic pulse across the installation, while the circulation and release of water make its presence physically tangible. The wet floor at the centre of the pavilion becomes reflective, catching the moving images projected onto the nine-metre back-wall screen.

As the reel turns, it gradually gathers the extended hose back around itself. The movement can also recall magnetic tape winding onto a cassette spool. This association carries particular resonance within the rural and agricultural culture surrounding the project, where farmers are also the people who sustain the panighíri and its musical world. Cassettes played an important role in recording and circulating this music through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The resemblance connects the mechanics of irrigation with another familiar rotating technology from the same rural world: the cassette carrying and circulating its music.

The machine’s movement is also defined by the fact that it cannot complete its turn. Its mechanics keep generating the impulse to rotate, while the architecture of the pavilion establishes a physical limit. The body advances, meets resistance, reverses and begins again. This repeated effort gives the machine a fragile persistence: it remains active, functional and purposeful, yet its movement is continually interrupted before completion. The installation turns this mechanical condition into a dramaturgical one, allowing difficulty, imbalance and renewed attempt to become perceptible while leaving their meaning open.

Xirómero/Dryland grows out of a way of listening that extends beyond sound itself. Distance, simultaneity, recurrence, interruption and shifts of intensity become ways of thinking through the installation as a whole. Listening guides how an event appears in relation to another, how several events can coexist across the pavilion, and how they form a sonic ecosystem. In this sense, listening becomes a way of composing a world of events in space, extending into image, machinery, objects, movement and architecture.

This way of listening also shapes the visitor’s movement through the pavilion. A sound may arrive from far away before its source becomes visible, remain present after the visitor turns elsewhere, or reappear from another part of the building. Near and far constantly change according to position. In rural environments, a local event can exist alongside something much more distant: insects may surround the listener while an irrigation machine works further away, a motorbike crosses a road, or the heavily amplified sound of a panighíri reaches the fields from a distant village square at night. Inside the pavilion, sound similarly allows events at different distances and scales to coexist at once.

The sonic material comes from many different sources and enters the composition through different degrees of transformation. Archive recordings from the 1970s and 80s meet field recordings made in farmland during the night or under the summer sun. The sound of faraway rural feasts gradually approaches village squares and musicians recorded at close range, while studio-recorded singers enter alongside electronic material and originally composed sound. The irrigation machine adds another layer through its direct acoustics, microphones and processing. Some recordings preserve much of the place or situation from which they came; others are slowed, layered or recomposed until their source becomes less immediately recognisable. The movement between recognition and transformation becomes part of the listening experience itself.

The 32 independent audio channels were distributed across the building rather than as a symmetrical surround setup. High-definition speakers, 1970s horn speakers and car speakers each bring a different sonic colour and directionality. Their placement allows sounds to remain highly local, expand across the entire pavilion or travel through it, as in the passage of a motorbike from one side of the space to another. Some loudspeakers are positioned high and directed towards the ceiling, allowing sound to diffuse through and reflect from the pavilion’s roof structure. Others operate close to the floor, from the basement, outside the building or from the moving irrigation machine itself. The architecture therefore participates directly in the way each sonic event acquires scale, distance and spatial character.

Recorded voices bring human presence into the installation without requiring the body to be physically there. Their rhythm and timbre can be perceived before their words become clear, while understanding the language opens another level of meaning. This layering becomes especially pronounced for an international audience. Female voices dominate the human presence of the work, including all of its singing voices. One recurring voice belongs to Ioánna Goússiou, Deligiannis’s mother, who remembers dancing at a feast in Tsepelovo and being recognised by two older men as “one of ours” through her dancing. Her recollection moves between memory, belonging and the physical knowledge of dance, while interruptions from music place the spoken testimony directly inside the larger composition.

The installation unfolds through an approximately twenty-minute recurring structure. Sound gradually changes its density and distance, moves between collective intensity and sparser, more isolated moments, and passes through fragmentation and shifts of focus. The irrigation machine remains present throughout, punctuating the cycle with the periodic exhaling of water and, once in each loop, the heavy fall of its cannon onto the pavilion floor. Materials disappear and later return altered; a voice may return from another position, while amplification can recede and allow the machine’s acoustic presence to become more clearly perceivable. The composition has no fixed beginning or end, unfolding in a continuous loop that each visitor enters at any moment.

The dialogue with the Greek Pavilion begins with a gesture of revelation through subtraction. Successive decorative and exhibition layers that had accumulated inside the building were removed, allowing its masonry, high ceiling, cement floor and exposed construction to come forward again. This clearing was not preparatory work outside the artwork; it became part of how the installation was conceived. The pavilion itself became part of the composition, with its own material and spatial presence.

Once revealed, the building begins to suggest several places at once. The overall composition was conceived around four spatial and temporal environments — a church, a panighíri and public square, a farm field and an agricultural warehouse — which overlap and coexist within the pavilion. Its neo-Byzantine form retains the character of a temple, while the exposed interior can recall a rural warehouse or the unfinished industrial spaces where panighíria sometimes take place. Paving slabs associated with outdoor public space enter the room; an agricultural irrigation machine occupies its centre. These associations remain layered over the actual pavilion, allowing several spatial realities to coexist while the building itself remains fully present.

The work begins before the visitor enters the pavilion. Sound reaches outside, while a stack of metal feast tables sits to the left of the entrance. Inside, other stacks of plastic chairs form part of the installation. Visitors can take a chair at will, sit wherever they choose and remain for as long as they wish. This freedom of movement and duration becomes part of the encounter with the work. The provisional arrangement also reflects the seasonal movement of agricultural labour and the temporary organisation of a panighíri, where equipment, furniture and people gather around a place and disperse again a few hours after the event is over. The installation aims to make this provisional condition visible. Alongside it, absence acquires a spatial presence of its own: voices inhabit the building without their bodies, the signs and sounds of a feast momentarily accumulate without the feast fully taking place, and fragments of a rural world remain suspended around an event that never completely assembles.

The Greek Pavilion also brings its own history into the work. By 2024, it had been used for Greece’s participation in the Venice Biennale for ninety years. Its temple-like architecture and this long exhibition history remain present during the temporary occupation of Xirómero/Dryland. From rural periphery to national representation, placing the large irrigation machine at the centre of this architecture becomes a direct physical gesture. Made to work in the fields, the machine passes through the pavilion’s relatively small entrance and occupies a space historically used to represent Greece internationally. The wider world that enters with it — the panighíri, the public square, rural labour and the forms of social life surrounding them — encounters a building already charged with its own architectural and representational history.

→ Read more about the Greek Pavilion

“The sound and auratic presence of ‘Xirómero/Dryland’ destabilize any division between reality and its representations.”
— Jace Clayton, e-flux Criticism

Critical responses approached Xirómero/Dryland through markedly different aspects of the installation. Writing in e-flux Criticism, Jace Clayton described it as a “brute affective choreography,” focusing on the unstable relationship between the irrigation machine’s physical presence and its composed audiovisual environment. Marilena Astrapellou in ΒΗΜΑgazino described the machine as a “huge heart” giving energy to the installation, while connecting the work to community, continuity and belonging. Other responses focused on water and labour, the rhythm and bodily presence of the machine, and the way sound, image, architecture and physical objects coexist without settling into a single narrative.

Coming largely from practices in the performing arts, the artistic team approached those entering the pavilion as an audience whose presence would inhabit the installation. The approximately twenty-minute composition ran continuously in a loop, and visitors could enter at any point in its cycle. They were free to move through the pavilion, take one of the plastic chairs and sit wherever they wanted, remain through one or several cycles, or continually change their position in relation to what was unfolding. The installation was conceived to act first through composition and sensation, allowing meaning to emerge through the experience itself rather than through the reconstruction of a narrative or the identification of its cultural references.

The responses left by visitors reveal how open that experience could become. They describe the work as “mysterious, familiar, sad,” “complex,” “deep,” “mesmerising,” “shocking” and “overwhelming”; one visitor wrote simply, “My chest is tight,” while another described an image producing “an abrupt laughter and tear in my eyes.” Others wrote “I didn’t want to leave,” or spoke of “universal and personal connections in unexpected and beautiful ways.” These reactions suggest an encounter in which humour, effort, repetition, interruption, vulnerability and absence can coexist: the machine remains functional yet struggles against its limits, voices appear in the absence of their bodies, and fragments of a celebration gather around an event that never fully takes place.

→ read more about the audience, with visitor testimonies and responses

→ read selected press, reviews, interviews and media coverage

Credits & Production

Artists
Conceived by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos, created along with Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas

Artistic collaborators
Fotini Papachristopoulou (artistic advice during the simulation and on-location work phases)
Vassiliki-Maria Plavou, Marios Stamatis (design of catalogue & communication material)

Light design: Stephanos Droussiotis
Design and coordination of audiovisual installation: Stavros Nikolakopoulos
Technical advisor for mechanics design and construction: Manos Vordonarakis
Lighting technician and programmer: Yannis Lavvas
Installation technicians: Yannis Nikolakopoulos, Nikos Bila, Nikos Sarafoglou
Assistant technicians for mechanics construction:
—Architect: Themis Istatiadis
—Automations: Ilias Kazais, Dimitris Ovadias
—Workers: Plywacz Tomasz, Starowicz Krzysztof, Pavel Nowak, Piotre Nowak, Ali Lotfolahi
Electrical installation: Ioannis Misaillis
Exhibition production: Giorgos Efstathoulidis – Constructivist Exhibitions, Antonia Chantzi

Cultural mediators / Pavilion invigilators: Theodora Giannopoulou, Anastasia Papastefanou, Aspasia Patrozou, Maria Michelaki, Tijana Stefanović, Adileily Olivares Jiménez, Polina Dmytrenko

Curator of the Greek Participation: Panos Giannikopoulos
Commissioner | Organisation: ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens

The artistic research for Xirómero/Dryland was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, initiated and directed in the context of the Margaroni Residency (2022 & 2023) by the Onassis AiR Fellows transdisciplinary artist, director & composer Thanasis Deligiannis and dramaturge & philologist Yannis Michalopoulos. The two of them brought together a team which included visual artist & filmmaker Elia Kalogianni, photographer & documentary filmmaker Yorgos Kyvernitis, sound engineer & designer Kostas Chaikalis and visual artist & architect Fotis Sagonas. The research developed through fieldwork, recordings, archival material and spatial experimentation before being re-composed for the Greek Pavilion.

Technical setup

The installation unfolds through an approximately twenty-minute composition running continuously throughout the pavilion’s opening hours. The irrigation machine’s rotation and mechanical states are read by sensors and communicated to the audiovisual system, allowing its movement to trigger or influence sound, moving image and light.

Sound is distributed through 32 independent audio outputs, using 14 L-Acoustics loudspeakers, including 2 subwoofers, 10 horn speakers and 10 car speakers positioned throughout the building. The moving-image system consists of 7 video channels, using 3 projectors, 3 monitors and 1 LED screen. The lighting setup combines theatre and industrial fixtures, including 14 HQI lights, 3 moving heads, 6 ETC fixtures and 4 LED tubes.

The installation also incorporates the modified irrigation machine and its hydraulic system, microphones capturing its mechanics, speakers integrated into or attached to the machine, and a sensor-based control system coordinating mechanical and audiovisual events.

Music sources and credits

The work’s music includes fragments from the folk song Yannos (voice: Kiki Margaroni, clarinet: Kostas Zafiropoulos) and the neo-folk songs Travmatías stin aghápi (music: Giorgos Koros, lyrics: Lakis Tsolis, voices: Natasa Tsakiridou, Lina Alatzidou, Dafni Nikolaou, Christina Kemanetzidou, recorded anew at Studio Praxis in Athens) and Vathiá Spiliá mes ta vouná (music: Vassilis Soukas, lyrics: Yiannis Chalkiadakis, voice: Kiki Margaroni, clarinet: Vangelis Soukas).

Greece’s participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia was funded by the Hellenic Republic – Ministry of Culture. Xirómero/Dryland was powered by Onassis Culture and supported by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the Athens Epidaurus Festival and the Greek National Tourism Organization. Support from ARTWORKS was provided through a founding grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Additional support was made possible by NEON Culture and Development Organization, Outset and the Qualco Foundation. AEGEAN was the official air carrier sponsor. The project took place under the auspices of the Municipality of Xirómero.

Special thanks go to Amsterdam-based I/O for its support and for providing parts of the installation.

Photos ©Thanasis Deligiannis
Featured photo (top) @Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi