Composer and interdisciplinary artist Thanasis Deligiannis has been chosen as 'featured artist' at the Venice Biennale. The project Xirómero / Dryland will be performed at the Greek Pavilion from 20 April to 24 November 2024. Thanasis conceived this interdisciplinary project together with Yannis Michalopoulos and created it along with with the artists Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas
Xirómero / Dryland is an immersive experience in the form of a hybrid installation that fuses 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 spatial and temporal composition that also intersects with the Greek pavilion itself. It enters into discourse with agricultural environments, technological impacts, cultural otherness, and its built setting to generate a multi-sensory experience. The project 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 feast day celebration) 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.
Thanasis Deligiannis (Larisa, Greece, 1983) studied Composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, obtaining his bachelor’s degree in 2008 and his master’s degree in 2010. He works as an interdisciplinary artist, composer, sound designer and performer. He was assistant to Heiner Goebbels at the Manchester International Festival and Artist in Residence at Gaudeamus and Onassis Air and he has been a member of Dimitris Papaioannou’s creative team at the Tanztheater Wuppertal – Pina Bausch Company. . He is a teacher of transdisciplinary approaches in performing arts at the CvA, and coach at the Composers’ Festival Amsterdam, the annual exam festival of the CvA’s Composition Department.
