Nightwater is a large-scale performance installation presented throughout the building of the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, where rural and urban realities fold into one another through the shifting logic of a dream.
Live musicians and performers, sound, moving image, water, machinery, objects and the architecture itself become part of one spatial composition. Drawing on a long-term artistic research into rural and agricultural cultures, Nightwater transforms fragments of landscape, festivity, labour and memory through their encounter with the Muziekgebouw, inviting visitors to move through the work and experience it along their own paths.
About Nightwater
The world from which Nightwater draws is shaped as much by agriculture and labour as by festivity. Fields, irrigation systems, machinery, songs, gatherings, food, nocturnal landscapes and social encounters belong to the same cultural environment, where working the land and coming together to celebrate are closely intertwined.
At the centre of the work is a large irrigation machine. Water, mechanical movement and sound place it somewhere between agricultural infrastructure, instrument, moving body and presence. Around it, elements drawn from this rural world are recomposed rather than reconstructed through field recordings, live music, amplified and electronic sound, moving image, light, objects and performance.
These materials are composed together with the spaces they inhabit. Nightwater enters into a dynamic dialogue with the Muziekgebouw, working with the existing functions, architecture and conventions of the building while simultaneously shifting them. Familiar elements of both the concert venue and the rural world are displaced and brought into new relations, producing an uncanny reality in which neither remains quite what it was.
The work forms a fragmented spatial and temporal composition. Events can happen simultaneously, disappear and return in altered forms; an image encountered on a screen may later seem to materialise in the surrounding space, while sounds and performers resurface elsewhere in the building. No single position offers a complete view. Visitors can remain in a space, move on, return, follow a sound or leave an event before it ends. Their experience depends on where they go, how long they stay and what they happen to encounter. “As a viewer, you create your own story, your own experience. You witness what is happening, but you also become part of the whole.”
Much of the material grew out of the long-term research initiated through the Margaroni Residency at Onassis Foundation, while parts had also passed through Xirómero/Dryland at the Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2024. Nightwater reopened this wider research field within the Muziekgebouw, together with new material developed during and after the Muziekgebouw Productiehuis residency.
A dream between worlds
Nightwater takes the form of a performative situation: part installation, part live event, continually shifting according to the visitor’s position and to events unfolding across the building. Its dream logic emerges from the meeting of two realities — the rural world brought into an urban cultural venue, and the existing reality of the Muziekgebouw. At moments they merge; at others they collide, displacing familiar functions of spaces and making them behave differently.
The Muziekgebouw’s Main Hall, normally organised around a stage and an audience facing it, becomes a shifted remembrance of a rural feast. The red seats and the stage disappear. Plastic chairs and tables occupy the hall, facing towards the main exit, towards the city itself. The hall still seems to await an audience, yet it is never occupied in the way a concert hall normally would be. Somewhere between the rural gathering and the cultural institution, another reality begins to form.
This intermediate condition extends to the form of the work. Materials developed through the research do not settle comfortably into the conventions of a concert, a performance or a visual installation. A machine can remain agricultural infrastructure while becoming a moving and sounding presence; recorded images can carry the reality of the situations from which they emerged while becoming part of another world. Documented material and performative situations begin to overlap, without one fully absorbing the other.
The irrigation machine occupies the Loading Dock almost as if it lives there — or has been left behind — transforming the space into an agricultural warehouse. Its mechanical pulse spreads through the building, in moments becoming its industrial heartbeat. On the opposite side of the venue, high up, the Small Hall contains Nightwater’s Dream: an audiovisual installation that could be experienced as the machine’s inner dream. Nocturnal road trips and irrigation in the fields appear in an open, associative sequence alongside the microtonal Fokker organ. Spare parts of the machine lie on a table somewhere between a service bench and a surgical table, while scattered plastic chairs invite visitors to stay.
This instability continues throughout the visitor’s experience. Events may seem to have just ended, may still be waiting to begin, or may return elsewhere in another form. Sounds emerge beyond sight; performers disappear and resurface; an empty chair, an inactive machine or a room in waiting can carry as much presence as an action taking place before an audience. The dream of Nightwater inhabits this in-between condition, where different places, times and realities can briefly coincide and alter one another.
Composing the Muziekgebouw
For Nightwater, composing the Muziekgebouw meant working with more than its architecture. A concert hall is also an organisation, a public institution and a collective cultural achievement: a building that a city has decided to construct, maintain and fund, and whose relevance continues to depend on people choosing to enter it. The presence of an audience is therefore not neutral. Coming together with our bodies in a concert hall, theatre or museum can already be understood as a political gesture: a form of participation in the shared life of a city and in the institutions we choose to sustain.
Material gathered through fieldwork had already been repeatedly brought into large working environments during the Margaroni Residency at Onassis Culture, where recordings, images, objects, machinery and actions could be assessed, selected, tested and recomposed. At the Muziekgebouw, this process encountered a functioning institution with its own workforce, public life, accumulated knowledge and history. Conversations with technicians, producers and programmers became part of understanding not only how the building works, but what it has been used for, what it can accommodate and what it might temporarily become. The familiar ways people enter, wait, gather, sit, listen and leave could themselves become part of how the work was shaped, allowing the building to be used and experienced in alternative ways.
The Muziekgebouw Productiehuis residency in 2024 offered the time and access to test these ideas from within the building. Moving through connected spaces with a test audience made it possible to experience directly how transitions, distances and shifts of attention worked in practice.
What kind of engaging experiences can we create for the audience in a dialogue with the very building? The building was not simply a place where the work would later be presented. Its passages, halls, foyers, acoustics and technical possibilities became part of how Nightwater was composed, and so did inventing ways people could inhabit it.
I kept walking through the building again and again, getting to know the people and taking photos of almost every angle, corner, wall and staircase. I attended different events and revisited what kind of audience comes to what, how the venue functions when these audiences are in house, and what the whole experience feels like. Gradually, I started shaping the building’s main joints and connecting the dots. I measured and remeasured the halls, foyers and backstage spaces until the whole building was in my head like a 3D map.
Sound would be the guide. I wanted to let it bounce off different surfaces and walls, travel from door to door and allow the audience to discover the points where different sound worlds crossfade. Hearing is a 360-degree experience. You can hear sound without seeing it. It can come from behind you. From afar. Further than your eyes can see. Sound can be disorienting, but if you listen carefully, you can also use sound to orient yourself. Sound is a dialogue with space. When we experience the world, we are not just surrounded by sound, we are in the sound. Ultimately, I don’t compose sound, but space, with sound as my guide.
What emerged was not a sequence of separate installations distributed through the venue, but a single composition unfolding across different parts of the building. Events could happen simultaneously in different areas; one part of the building could affect another without being visible from it; the audience could never occupy the work from one complete point of view. In this sense, composing the Muziekgebouw also meant shaping the conditions through which people could navigate, inhabit and partially construct Nightwater for themselves.
A work changing through time
Nightwater was conceived to change through time rather than repeat itself in a fixed form. During the performance installation, visitors entered in groups every half hour and could remain for different lengths of time. The three-day programme changed form as it progressed: the first two evenings centred on the performance installation with Ensemble Klang, Saturday continued late into the night with The Rest Is Noise, and Sunday shifted into a daytime focus under the theme At The Public Square, conceived as part of the overall structure of Nightwater. The audience changed with these shifts as well, with younger visitors increasingly becoming the majority towards Saturday night, while Sunday brought more families and children.
This changing quality also belongs to the longer development of the work. Nightwater grows out of the research initiated through the Margaroni Residency, while some of its material had also passed through Xirómero/Dryland before being reopened and recomposed at the Muziekgebouw. The two works are not successive versions of one another, but different realisations emerging from the same wider research field. Recordings, moving images, objects, sounds, actions and other material could return in new combinations, acquire another scale or function, or be placed in entirely different relations. What continues from one project to another is therefore not a fixed set of elements, but a body of material that remains open to transformation.
Reception
Critical responses to Nightwater picked up different aspects of the work: its encounter with the cultural institution, the vulnerability and emotional force of particular moments, and the way audiences gradually found their own paths through the building.
Jelena Novak, Positionen (DE)
“It was astounding and unpleasant at the same time. Turbo-folk was turned into a readymade, a found object with which the artist questions the borders of the artistic institution and the art world itself. The Muziekgebouw’s audience was a bit perplexed at first, but easily accepted ‘the game’.”
“A huge irrigation machine was waiting there, as well as electronic music incorporating rural machinery sounds, and Ensemble Klang playing in a live procession like a kind of community band. The most touching moment occurred when the live solo singing of the female vocalist was synchronized with projections of Orthodox church music and early-music-style singing. Folklore was shown in all its depth and strength; it was one of the most profound singing moments I have ever experienced on any stage. The vulnerability behind it was extremely rare and sincere.”
“There are memories of remote fields, winds, songs, sounds, noises, drinks and food, scents and dances, embraces—the old world that is disappearing. All of this is shown in Nightwater, an occupation that remains floating like a phantom of home, belonging, and embrace.”
Neil van der Linden, OperaMagazine.nl (NL)
“The half-hour time slot has come to an end. But the audience is free to wander through the building as they please. Somewhere in a small side room off a corridor, another video has been set up, this time showing a flock of sheep. You are invited to reflect for a moment on why sheep stay together even when they are standing in an enormous field where they could go in any direction. It is group instinct. Together they are stronger. An individual may occasionally be eaten by a wolf, but enough of them will remain. It also makes me think about how we, as an audience, initially moved obediently through the building together, until people gradually began to continue along their own paths.”
“If you take your time and try to find the right combination of concentration and ease, Thanasis Deligiannis and his extensive artistic team of designers and performers lead you into a world that is undoubtedly based on Greek landscapes and traditions, but is also very much a world of its own.”
Credits
Creative Team
Thanasis Deligiannis – concept, direction, composition, sound design & cinematography
Yannis Michalopoulos – concept, dramaturgy & research
Kostas Chaikalis – sound engineer & assistant sound designer
Elia Kalogianni – artistic collaborator on cinematography & installation
Yorgos Kyvernitis – cinematography
Performers
Natasa Tsakiridou – singer
Lina Alatzidou – singer
Alexandros Papageorgopoulos – clarinetist
Ensemble Klang
Saskia Lankhoorn – keyboardist
Peter Harden – electric guitarist
Joey Marijs – percussionist
The Rest Is Noise X Nightwater program featured DJs Deena Abdelwahed & Zohar.
I/O Production & Technical Team
Frank van der Weij – project manager
Rania Mavriki – production manager
Gerco van Veenen – technical director
Yan Kelleghan, Ivet Serra, Dimitra Sofroniou, Anastasia Papastefanou – (artistic & production) interns
Related Pages
→ Muziekgebouw: About Nightwater
→ Interview: Thanasis Deligiannis on Nightwater — Dana Linssen
→ Interview: An estranging rural feast — Myrthe Meester
→ Muziekgebouw Productiehuis residency
Photos by Yorgos Kyvernitis (featured photo), Jascha Bordon (photos 1, 7, 18), Foppe Schut (2, 4-6, 8-9, 16-17), Thanasis Deligiannis (10-15) and Thomas Beltsios (3).
Nightwater is a co-production of the Muziekgebouw Productiehuis and the I/O Foundation, and is presented with the support of Het Cultuurfonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Onassis Stegi – Touring Program, HVA International, the Greek Embassy in the Netherlands, Aegean Airlines and The Greek House in Rotterdam.
