Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos present a site-specific performance at Onassis Ready

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Between the traditional feasts of the countryside, the basement joints blasting with Greek folk clarinets (the so-called ‘klarina’) and the nightclubs of Athens, lay the lives, voices and imagination of traditional musicians, as well as an entire world that goes hand in hand. How does the Greek traditional feast evolve though the years? Composer Thanasis Deligiannis and playwright and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos initiated ‘Margaroni Residency’ in June of 2022.

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Through this research project, their objective is to study the musical civilization across the Greek periphery but offer a novel understanding as well of its evolution and acceptance in the 1970s and 1980s.

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By revisiting the life of a female folk singer as their case study and the creative assembly of multimedia material, they are conducting field trips to Xiromero and Thessaly, record, film, seek, find, and suggest answers to questions around the position of woman, the patterns of seasonal work, and the rural landscape of the periphery. Following the special feast that they set up with ENA ENA in the Exhibition Hall -1 of the Onassis Stegi in November of 2021, the artists and researchers return as Onassis Residents for a residency program until May 2023.

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Over the course of November, the creative team of Margaroni Residency ‘inhabits’ the building at Legaki Street. Following the research they conducted across Aetolia-Acarnania, Thessaly, and Preveza and with the input of a now broadened team of collaborators, they set out to classify and explore the material they collected during their summer expeditions.

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Video, interviews, photographs, field recordings, maps, books, records, cassettes, construction materials, and an agricultural machinery, have been installed in the space of Legaki building, in order to reveal through hands-on test runs and experimental actions their common dynamics.

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The experience and intentions of the creative team enter into a dialogue with the expressive capacities of a team comprised of artists and theorists and put to the test fragments of the assorted material, in an initial attempt to synthesize them through stage actions, sequences of sound, video installations, discussions, etc.