InFrame/Special Event
At Onassis Stegiفي البدء كان المشمش
In the Beginning Were the Apricots
Special Performance
|60'
by Carol Sansour كارول صنصور and Kalogerakis brothers كالويراكيس
The festival closes with a special one-hour performance bringing together Palestinian poet Carol Sansour and the Kalogeraki Brothers for their second collaboration and appearance with Onassis. Marking the release of a new album, the performance gives new life to Sansour’s poetry through Greek translations by Natassa Sideri and original music and vocals by Michalis and Pantelis Kalogerakis.
Building on their first encounter, this collaboration goes deeper into the space between poetry and music, language and belonging, memory and place. Sansour’s intimate and charged poems, moving through homeland, displacement, love, and everyday life are transformed into a live musical experience, where words cross from Arabic into Greek and into voice. The result is an atmospheric meeting of Palestinian poetic tradition and contemporary Greek songwriting: a performance about translation not simply as language, but as an act of connection, transformation, and shared listening.
Carol Sansour كارول صنصور Born in Jerusalem, she is a Palestinian poet and cultural producer based in Athens, Greece. Known for her provocative exploration of post-national, post-gender, and post-religion identities, she is a passionate advocate for cultural change. Sansour's debut collection, في المشمش (In the Time of the Apricots), was published in 2019 in a trilingual edition. Her poetry has been featured in international journals like Words Without Borders, Exchanges, and Arablit, and showcased at prominent festivals, including the Festival d'Avignon and Institut du Monde Arabe. She is the director of the Athens Palestine Film Festival and founder of the not-for-profit organization Dounias, which is dedicated to producing and exhibiting art and culture from Palestine and the Arab world in Greece. Carol Sansour is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2024/25.
Michalis and Pantelis Kalogerakis create and perform music with spoken word. They are twin brothers from Crete, and have been experimenting with the intersection of poetry, music and theater ever since they were children. Their discography includes 6 albums, among which Rebotika (Rimbaud + Rempetika), that fuses rebetiko songs with letters exchanged between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Their sixth project, The Tales of Melpomene, was presented in 2024 at the Alternative Stage of the National Opera House at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation. They have performed with renowned musicians, such as Martha Fritzila, and Maria Faradouri, and at prominent cultural venues throughout Greece. Michalis and Pantelis live in Athens.
