Drumming Water – Creative Lecture in Three Parts
Brandon LaBelle
I’m often thinking back to early experiences I had while living in southern California, which contributed to an interest, even a practice, related to sound. These formative experiences are deeply inflected by the ever-present sounds of the ocean; living close to the beaches trailing down the coast from Los Angeles, I would often find myself being part of small gatherings of friends who would congregate along the cliffs. These were gatherings shaped by teenage life, as well as the whispers and roars of oceanic tides. It was through the blending of informal collectivity and sonorous fluidity that sound, and a general socio-acoustic position, became a central concern. For the program on the topic of water, I’d like to elaborate on the potentiality of an oceanic listening. This includes mapping a number of perspectives, from the ways in which tides, and the dynamic force of an oceanic movement, can incite the auditory imagination, to how this suggests a broader agency found in wet sound. Wet sound names the quality of acoustic reverberation and, within the context of sound production, is explicitly applied in building spatial volume. As such, wet sound can be appreciated as a specific form of amplification, a lifting up, even a poetic worlding, granting a sense of possibility, connection, hope. In this regard, wet sound acoustically quenches in times of thirst, when being parched lessens the voice and the capacity to speak. In such desperate times, the deeply renewing fountain of sound gives greatly to the nurturing of social movement.
Aquatic Mythologies, Haunted Listening and the Undercurrents of Water
Dāna Papachristou & George Samantas
Immanently transitory unless forcefully constrained, a medium for purification or an agent of corrosion, life-giver or contaminator, a narcissistic reflector and an immersive envelope, water, with its fluid agency, runs through myth, politics and contested economies, gendered bodies, dreams and nightmares, desires and abject dystopias. In Pelion mountain, the affluent springs (such a fine metaphor for the essence of well-being) in a moment turned into a threat and a trauma. The proposed workshop invites to a field expedition to water routes in three distinct yet interrelated sessions: listening, sounding out, and recording. We will walk and listen together attentively, share mythologies, and record. The collected objects -environmental, voice and narrative, will evaporate into the Cloud and haunt the locations visited with instances of the shared experience.
Sympathy for the Devil
Nicolas Remy, Evangelia Paxinou, Petros Flampouris
The COVID-19 crisis and catastrophic climate events highlight human vulnerability and our role in built and natural environments. More specifically, the recent deluge of September in Thessaly has forced its inhabitants to become aware of the dramatic consequences of climate change. This research explores the interplay between sound, space, and the human body through the concept of "resounding ruins." Sound, as a universal language, is used to uncover the connections between our surroundings and our sensory perceptions. The study is centered on the abandoned building of the Sanatorium in Pilio in Greece, where participants engage in sonic encounters to enhance their understanding of environmental sounds and their implications. Nature and the built environment have been coexisting for many years and the presence of an infinity of sound fluids - small river stream, wind, air flows, sounds - constitutes an ideal terrain for rethinking our aesthetic relationships with our environment. By using tools like 92.5FM Sympathy radio and in-situ improvisation, participants create a dynamic sound “milieu” that fosters a deeper connection with their environment. This approach challenges traditional notions of soundscape (against soundscape) and emphasizes experiential emerging (against immersion) in order to develop a new aesthetic leading to a profound engagement with the ambiance creation of the ruins.
From the Margaroni Residency (Thessaly, Xirómero, Athens) to Xirómero/Dryland (Venice Art Biennale 2024)
Thanasis Deligiannis
Between the traditional feasts of the countryside, the basement dining bars 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 through the years? Composer and interdisciplinary artist Thanasis Deligiannis and playwright and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos initiated and directed the ‘Margaroni Residency’ in June of 2022 as Onassis Culture fellows, which led to the work Xirómero/Dryland at Venice Art Biennale 2024.
Through this artistic research, their objective was to study the musical culture across the Greek periphery, offering a novel understanding as well of its development and acceptance in the 1970s and 1980s. By revisiting the life of a female folk singer as their case study and the creative assembly of multimedia material, they conducted field trips to Xirómero and Thessaly, recorded, filmed, sought, found, and suggested answers to questions around the position of woman, the patterns of seasonal work, and the rural landscape of the periphery. Video, interviews, photographs, field recordings, maps, books, records, cassettes, construction materials, and an agricultural machine had been installed in large industrial workshop spaces in order to reveal their common dynamics through hands-on test-runs and experimental actions.
Two years forward, the outcome of their research is being adjusted for and installed in the Greek Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Xirómero/Dryland is an immersive experience taking the form of a hybrid installation that fuses together its varied elements. 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 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.
Artistic collaborators: Fotini Papachristopoulou (simulation & on-location installation phases), Vassiliki-Maria Plavou, Marios Stamatis (design of publications & communication material)
Light design: Stephanos Droussiotis
Curator: Panos Giannikopoulos
Commissioner | Organisation: ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Beyond the Aesthetics of Disaster: Echoes from Thessaly's Post-Flood Landscapes
Petros Phokaides
Disasters, such as earthquakes, wildfires or floods, evoke powerful emotional responses to the destruction of anthropogenic environments, such as housing and infrastructures, but also to the loss of human and other-than-human lives, invoking, ultimately, a sense of urgency. From the rescue missions and the humanitarian relief to the processes of long-term recovery and rebuilding, the iconography of suffering and catastrophe invites human intervention as a remedy to anxiety, offering the promise of protection, safety, and even a better future. Whether hastily moved out of sight or memorialized, ruins are decontextualized and aestheticized by popular media and national politics (Gordillo 2014). This form of response to the accelerating ecological catastrophes of our times—from Thessaly to the Anthropocene—risk renewing the belief in human agency, expertise, technocracy, and developmentalism as well as maintaining collective blindness to the (racialized) processes of "ruination" (Stoler 2013) and "slow violence" (Nixon 2011) which persist outside of the public sphere yet are experienced by those "othered" left to dwell in the ruined landscapes. Ruins, however, are also filled with potential and possibility. Ruins can expose the material and symbolic traces of imperialism, state violence, injustices and human rights violations and, potentially, they can become "epicenters of renewed collective claims [...] and [of] unexpected collaborative political projects" (Stoler 2013: 14) for reclamation of the past and the future on behalf of the oppressed.
As part of the 3rd International Workshop in Theory and Sound, this session aims to connect larger theoretical discussions on the politics and aesthetics of disaster with situated perspectives on the post-flood landscapes of Thessaly. Short presentations and an open discussion will allow us to think collectively on the critical questions: What happens once the flood is over, and the muddy water have receded, and who, eventually, picks up the pieces once the "spectacle passes on" (Tsing 2005)? How do human and other-than-human communities return to inhabit post-flood landscapes, and how do new lives emerge amidst ruins? In turn, how can theoretical framings, situated methodologies and artistic practices allow us to think beyond the aesthetics of ruins to expose the palimpsests of infrastructural violence and environmental neglect and degradation in Thessaly and beyond? What forms of archival practices and sensibilities can be developed to capture what was silenced, and what still echoes, perhaps, beyond human perception?
Brandon LaBelle
I’m often thinking back to early experiences I had while living in southern California, which contributed to an interest, even a practice, related to sound. These formative experiences are deeply inflected by the ever-present sounds of the ocean; living close to the beaches trailing down the coast from Los Angeles, I would often find myself being part of small gatherings of friends who would congregate along the cliffs. These were gatherings shaped by teenage life, as well as the whispers and roars of oceanic tides. It was through the blending of informal collectivity and sonorous fluidity that sound, and a general socio-acoustic position, became a central concern. For the program on the topic of water, I’d like to elaborate on the potentiality of an oceanic listening. This includes mapping a number of perspectives, from the ways in which tides, and the dynamic force of an oceanic movement, can incite the auditory imagination, to how this suggests a broader agency found in wet sound. Wet sound names the quality of acoustic reverberation and, within the context of sound production, is explicitly applied in building spatial volume. As such, wet sound can be appreciated as a specific form of amplification, a lifting up, even a poetic worlding, granting a sense of possibility, connection, hope. In this regard, wet sound acoustically quenches in times of thirst, when being parched lessens the voice and the capacity to speak. In such desperate times, the deeply renewing fountain of sound gives greatly to the nurturing of social movement.
Aquatic Mythologies, Haunted Listening and the Undercurrents of Water
Dāna Papachristou & George Samantas
Immanently transitory unless forcefully constrained, a medium for purification or an agent of corrosion, life-giver or contaminator, a narcissistic reflector and an immersive envelope, water, with its fluid agency, runs through myth, politics and contested economies, gendered bodies, dreams and nightmares, desires and abject dystopias. In Pelion mountain, the affluent springs (such a fine metaphor for the essence of well-being) in a moment turned into a threat and a trauma. The proposed workshop invites to a field expedition to water routes in three distinct yet interrelated sessions: listening, sounding out, and recording. We will walk and listen together attentively, share mythologies, and record. The collected objects -environmental, voice and narrative, will evaporate into the Cloud and haunt the locations visited with instances of the shared experience.
Sympathy for the Devil
Nicolas Remy, Evangelia Paxinou, Petros Flampouris
The COVID-19 crisis and catastrophic climate events highlight human vulnerability and our role in built and natural environments. More specifically, the recent deluge of September in Thessaly has forced its inhabitants to become aware of the dramatic consequences of climate change. This research explores the interplay between sound, space, and the human body through the concept of "resounding ruins." Sound, as a universal language, is used to uncover the connections between our surroundings and our sensory perceptions. The study is centered on the abandoned building of the Sanatorium in Pilio in Greece, where participants engage in sonic encounters to enhance their understanding of environmental sounds and their implications. Nature and the built environment have been coexisting for many years and the presence of an infinity of sound fluids - small river stream, wind, air flows, sounds - constitutes an ideal terrain for rethinking our aesthetic relationships with our environment. By using tools like 92.5FM Sympathy radio and in-situ improvisation, participants create a dynamic sound “milieu” that fosters a deeper connection with their environment. This approach challenges traditional notions of soundscape (against soundscape) and emphasizes experiential emerging (against immersion) in order to develop a new aesthetic leading to a profound engagement with the ambiance creation of the ruins.
From the Margaroni Residency (Thessaly, Xirómero, Athens) to Xirómero/Dryland (Venice Art Biennale 2024)
Thanasis Deligiannis
Between the traditional feasts of the countryside, the basement dining bars 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 through the years? Composer and interdisciplinary artist Thanasis Deligiannis and playwright and philologist Yannis Michalopoulos initiated and directed the ‘Margaroni Residency’ in June of 2022 as Onassis Culture fellows, which led to the work Xirómero/Dryland at Venice Art Biennale 2024.
Through this artistic research, their objective was to study the musical culture across the Greek periphery, offering a novel understanding as well of its development and acceptance in the 1970s and 1980s. By revisiting the life of a female folk singer as their case study and the creative assembly of multimedia material, they conducted field trips to Xirómero and Thessaly, recorded, filmed, sought, found, and suggested answers to questions around the position of woman, the patterns of seasonal work, and the rural landscape of the periphery. Video, interviews, photographs, field recordings, maps, books, records, cassettes, construction materials, and an agricultural machine had been installed in large industrial workshop spaces in order to reveal their common dynamics through hands-on test-runs and experimental actions.
Two years forward, the outcome of their research is being adjusted for and installed in the Greek Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Xirómero/Dryland is an immersive experience taking the form of a hybrid installation that fuses together its varied elements. 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 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.
Artistic collaborators: Fotini Papachristopoulou (simulation & on-location installation phases), Vassiliki-Maria Plavou, Marios Stamatis (design of publications & communication material)
Light design: Stephanos Droussiotis
Curator: Panos Giannikopoulos
Commissioner | Organisation: ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Beyond the Aesthetics of Disaster: Echoes from Thessaly's Post-Flood Landscapes
Petros Phokaides
Disasters, such as earthquakes, wildfires or floods, evoke powerful emotional responses to the destruction of anthropogenic environments, such as housing and infrastructures, but also to the loss of human and other-than-human lives, invoking, ultimately, a sense of urgency. From the rescue missions and the humanitarian relief to the processes of long-term recovery and rebuilding, the iconography of suffering and catastrophe invites human intervention as a remedy to anxiety, offering the promise of protection, safety, and even a better future. Whether hastily moved out of sight or memorialized, ruins are decontextualized and aestheticized by popular media and national politics (Gordillo 2014). This form of response to the accelerating ecological catastrophes of our times—from Thessaly to the Anthropocene—risk renewing the belief in human agency, expertise, technocracy, and developmentalism as well as maintaining collective blindness to the (racialized) processes of "ruination" (Stoler 2013) and "slow violence" (Nixon 2011) which persist outside of the public sphere yet are experienced by those "othered" left to dwell in the ruined landscapes. Ruins, however, are also filled with potential and possibility. Ruins can expose the material and symbolic traces of imperialism, state violence, injustices and human rights violations and, potentially, they can become "epicenters of renewed collective claims [...] and [of] unexpected collaborative political projects" (Stoler 2013: 14) for reclamation of the past and the future on behalf of the oppressed.
As part of the 3rd International Workshop in Theory and Sound, this session aims to connect larger theoretical discussions on the politics and aesthetics of disaster with situated perspectives on the post-flood landscapes of Thessaly. Short presentations and an open discussion will allow us to think collectively on the critical questions: What happens once the flood is over, and the muddy water have receded, and who, eventually, picks up the pieces once the "spectacle passes on" (Tsing 2005)? How do human and other-than-human communities return to inhabit post-flood landscapes, and how do new lives emerge amidst ruins? In turn, how can theoretical framings, situated methodologies and artistic practices allow us to think beyond the aesthetics of ruins to expose the palimpsests of infrastructural violence and environmental neglect and degradation in Thessaly and beyond? What forms of archival practices and sensibilities can be developed to capture what was silenced, and what still echoes, perhaps, beyond human perception?
