My house is burned but I continue to scatter my blossoms as if nothing happened is a 60 minute sound piece, an image-free work that stands in-between documentary theatre and non-scripted film making, by Yorgos Petrou and Stelios Ilchuk. The ancient amphitheatre, the place where Petrou hangs out as a teenager at a time when the site was a barrier-free public space, now calling for a listening session, at once reclaims a presence through voice, and demonstrates Petrou’s politically nuanced and multi-layered approach to heritage, colonialism and memory. Ilchuk’s music affords an expanded take on reclamation and revision through beats and textures, elaborating noise and silence, that travel freely between bodies and dimensions.

 

The work follows the month-long residency of Petrou at Ekso in October 2024, where they embarked on spatial mapping, performing, vocalising, foraging sounds, images and materials from Cyprus. They visit their childhood home, tend the crops of their ancestors, enter the ruins of the room where they were born, and roam the rural and urban landscape in the Paphos district. Looking at bodies as islands and volcanos the work navigates through personal geographies into collective histories of migration and belonging.