Onassis AiR Summer Open Days 2025

On June 20th and 21st, join us for two exciting days where the Onassis AiR Fellows take over the residency spaces to showcase their in-progress work.

Discover a diverse mix of performances, installations, screenings, and research presentations, meet the artists, and explore the various stages of their creative process.

After welcoming over 500 attendees at our Fall and Spring Open Days, we’re thrilled to wrap up the season with this summer edition—and we’d love for you to be part of it.

The artists showcasing their projects on the Summer Open Days are:

Emma Camille Barreto, Niki Danai Chania, Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja, Irini Kalaitzidi, Inshallah Montero, Margarita Pita, Carol Sansour, Marios Stamatis, VIGIL (Foteini Stamatelopoulou & Despina Sanida Crezia), Rosa Whiteley.

On Friday evening, the third iteration of this season’s Electric Café by STEGI.RADIO will bring together a fusion of electric and classical sounds.

Friday, June 20 (19:00–22:30) and Saturday, June 21 (18:00–22:30)
[presenting throughout the event]

Emma Camille Barreto | Soil Citizens | Mixed-media installation

Niki Danai Chania | Allilovorá | Sculptural installation

Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja | through the looking sea | Mixed-media installation

Inshallah Montero | Reclaiming Filipineza: Shaping the Dream Landscape of the Filipina Immigrant | Audiovisual installation

Carol Sansour | In the East, There Is No Homeland Without War فِي الشَّرْقِ لَا وَطَنَ دُونَ حَرْبٍ | Poetry installation & video diary

Marios Stamatis | Neither This Nor the Other | Mixed-media Installation

VIGIL | 2XU | Video installation

Rosa Whiteley | Cultivated Atmospheres: The Other Weather Forecast | Mixed-media installation

Friday, June 20 | 19:00–22:30

19:30–20:15 | Margarita Pita | Dreamwalk | Theater Performance Prototype [in Greek]

19:45–20:00 | Marios Stamatis | Neither This Nor the Other | Performance

20:00–20:20 | Niki Danai Chania | Allilovorá | Performance

20:45–21:00 | Marios Stamatis | Neither This Nor the Other | Performance

21:00–21:30 | Carol Sansour | In the East, There Is No Homeland Without War فِي الشَّرْقِ لَا وَطَنَ دُونَ حَرْبٍ | Live performance

21:30–22:05 | STEGI.RADIO | Electric Café | Sound performance

21:30 – 22:15 | Margarita Pita | Dreamwalk | Theater Performance Prototype [in English]

Saturday, June 21 | 18:00–22:30

18:30–19:00 | Irini Kalaitzidi | CLASS CRASH | Talk & Presentation of research material

19:00–19:15 | Marios Stamatis | Neither This Nor the Other | Performance

19:15–19:35 | Rosa Whiteley | Cultivated Atmospheres: The Other Weather Forecast | Artist Talk

19:40–20:00 | Emma Camille Barreto | Soil Citizens | Artist Talk

20:00–20:20 | Niki Danai Chania | Allilovorá | Performance

20:20-20:40 | Carol Sansour | In the East, There Is No Homeland Without War فِي الشَّرْقِ لَا وَطَنَ دُونَ حَرْبٍ | Artist Talk

20:30–22:30 | Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja | through the looking sea | Sound Performance

Emma Camille Barreto | Soil Citizens

Through a speculative apartment installation, join the research process of Emma Camille Barreto as she documents the inner lives of the soil mesofauna in Athens.

This presentation is the beginning of an ongoing process exploring insect, meso-, and macro-organismic communication and expression. Using purely autodidactic methods, the deeply personal relationships formed with the subjects are investigated through a lens defying the scientific method and conventional ideas about animal intelligence.

Niki Danai Chania | Allilovorá

“Allilovorá” is a sculptural installation, a portal emerging from research into folk stories— especially those rooted in myth—activated by a performance. Personal memories, dreams, and experiences merge with myths to form new narratives—both as continuations and ruptures with the old. The stories are re-told from the present in the place where they were born. The new monsters are linked to ancient ones transformed by divine forces against their will, serving as allegories for today’s socio-political systems, where escape is impossible. In this revised order, monsters become the protagonists seeking freedom. Gold, once symbolizing beauty, reward, and desire, is overtaken and possessed by them.

Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja | through the looking sea

Diogo and Fallon will present the early stages of “through the looking sea,” with a fanzine collecting different visual and textual drafts, supported by a series of small sculptures and a sound piece. Together, they are working on a speculative mythology of an underwater community, re-imagining the memory of the Mediterranean Sea while drawing attention to colonial mechanisms and structures that are still present.

Irini Kalaitzidi | CLASS CRASH

As part of Open Days, Irini shares recent findings and reflections from her ongoing research into AI classification systems used to track human actions. The talk traces her process of engaging with surveillance technologies and the impossibility of pairing movement with language when bodies are forced into flat, rectangular frames and fixed labels.

Inshallah Montero | Reclaiming Filipineza

In 1998, a Greek dictionary defined ‘Filipineza’ [i.e., female Filipino] as ‘maid.’ This video landscape is a sacred space to reclaim the true ‘Filipineza’—a healer, a priestess, and a mother.

Deep in the blood of these migrant women run traces of our pre-colonial past—the sanctity of women as portals from the dream world to the material world. This installation comes from conversations about their journeys in both the physical and astral realms—of sacrifice and dreams.

Margarita Pita | Dreamwalk

“Dreamwalk” blurs the worlds of live theater performance, virtual reality, and audio spatial design to create a vivid one-to-one and one-to-many hybrid reality journey in quest of hope and its illuminating manifestation in the world.

Inspired by Ernst Bloch’s philosophical exploration of hope and the unfinished nature of reality, “Dreamwalk” opens a temporary, fragile space where one can trace the hopes, the dreams, and the flickering possibilities of humanity.

In a world where the capacity for dreaming is occupied by the darkest and most desperate of future visions, the piece invites us to venture—alone yet together—in an exploratory journey of a World Not Yet become and its potential revelation of utopia.

Where/How can we hope (for) and dream (of) a better life?

Carol Sansour | In the East, There Is No Homeland Without War فِي الشَّرْقِ لَا وَطَنَ دُونَ حَرْبٍ

A genre-defying poetry performance by Carol Sansour and the Kalogeraki Brothers, where Arabic and Greek collide through the words of Katerina Gogou and Sansour. Poetry and original music fuse in a live translation, challenging boundaries, redefining meaning, and evoking the fluid space between languages, cultures, and identities. As part of this two-day event, Sansour will also present a bilingual visual poetry installation that blends Greek and Arabic texts, exploring political identity and public space.

Marios Stamatis | Neither This Nor the Other

An automated performative installation, “Neither This Nor the Other,” explores techno-romance, physical exhaustion, and the surreal desire for connection in a heavily mediated world. Drawing from a developing performance script, it centers on respiration—strained, erratic, fading—as a metaphor for emotional volatility, disembodiment, and the blurred boundaries between dream and data, love and code, presence and derealization.

VIGIL | 2XU

A video installation in which two pairs of eyes explore the city of Athens through the lens of friendship, struggle, and solidarity. Their walking feet follow their gaze in a city they know well. Their discussions are a form of informal storytelling, in which various narrations are woven together in an attempt to subvert the oneness of subjectivity.

Rosa Whiteley | Cultivated Atmospheres: The Other Weather Forecast

Installation of ongoing research into the connection between atmospheric systems and food politics. The work displayed explores alternative methods of weather prediction through cloud watching, the early flowering of plants, the bones of lambs, or the biting behavior of insects when it’s about to rain.

Electric Café is the meeting point for the creative scene of Athens, a hub for producers, artists, and communities. An invitation to gather under the same roof and be present with each other, open to fresh ideas and yet-to-be-unearthed tastes and sonic combinations. An opportunity to solidify communal bonds while being immersed in music.

For its third iteration of this season, Electric Café presents Sissi Makropoulou, a versatile harp virtuoso, composer, and electronic music artist based in Athens and Berlin who creates and performs her music under the name Sissi Rada, where she blends harp with experimental sounds, seamlessly mixing classical traditions with contemporary innovation.

About Sissi Makropoulou

Sissi Makropoulou is a versatile harp virtuoso, composer, and electronic music artist based in Athens and Berlin. With a distinguished career as a harpist, she has collaborated with prestigious ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Deutsche Oper, and MusicAeterna, and has performed as a soloist with the Athens State Orchestra, Sinfonietta Köln, and the Nordwestdeutsche Sinfonietta. In addition to her classical work, she creates and performs her own music under the name Sissi Rada, where she blends harp with experimental sounds, seamlessly mixing classical traditions with contemporary innovation. She has released music on Stroom Records, Kryptox, Inner Ear, and Brilliant Classics.

The Onassis AiR Open Days is a series of public events held throughout the year, each uniquely shaped based on the practices of the Onassis AiR Fellows participating in the residency at that time. These events are designed to showcase the diverse disciplines and projects developed within the residency program.

For the 2024/25 season, we introduced a new two-day format for each Open Days event—an evolution from the single-day structure of previous years. This shift allowed for a more expansive experience, giving space and time for deeper engagement with the Onassis AiR Fellows and their works-in-progress shared through formats such as screenings, performances, talks, soundscapes, or immersive installations.