The artists say: “Between the fair, the underground clarinet shop, the field, the farm shed and the church are the lives, voices and imagination of folk musicians, and a whole world that goes along with them. There are of course those, men, but mostly women, who have stopped being part of this ever-renewing world. Their centrifugal journey is, in the background, the one that defined the contours of our project. The substrate is the experience and memory of one of us, who as a child watches and listens to the celebration from afar at night and sometimes sits on the hose of the sprinkler while it is being unrolled in a field in the Thessalian plain. With these thoughts and the primary intention to set in motion an open process of artistic research, we started at Margaroni Residency to explore the human experience of absence and presence in the ecosystem that creates the Greek festival. We traced the route from the centre of a provincial settlement to the edges of the agricultural landscape that surrounds it. We started from the square, where the festival is set up, on the slabs and concrete, from the festival and its economy, the working musicians and farmers, the poster, the tape, the electricity, the sound amplification, the space, the food, the children, the tree, the rain, the field, the tractor, the water, the watering machine, the soil, the cotton, the absence of a woman. In order to make this journey, we gathered in the countryside, in the streets, in former industrial spaces, where we tried out actions and materials, but also online, discussing on three-dimensional models, since all or some of the things that move us had to fit into the Greek pavilion in a way that left space for absence to speak. At a distance from the aesthetic processing of the objects that make up the installation – a gesture of unmediated performativity – the importance of the composition is emphasized: within a shell, similar on the outside to a church without a dome, which, having lost its internal hagiography, now resembles a rural warehouse, where machinery conjures up the agony of national representations. A shift between dominant and marginalized cultural object, which seems to create the intermediate space for the constitution of new meanings. Guided by sound and its materiality, with Xiromero/Dryland we seek a multi-sensory experience, proposing an allegorical geography that hears the fair and sees the water.”