





My house is burned but I scatter my blossoms like nothing happened is a 60-minute sound piece by Yorgos Petrou, with music composed and produced by Stelios Ilchuk. The work exists between documentary theatre and non-scripted filmmaking, transforming the ancient amphitheatre—a place where Petrou hung out as a teenager when the site was a barrier-free public space—into a site for listening. It 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.
The work follows Petrou’s month-long residency at Ekso in October 2024, where they embarked on spatial mapping, performing, vocalising, and foraging sounds, images and materials from Cyprus. Petrou visits their childhood home, tends the crops of their ancestors, enters the ruins of the room where they were born, and roams the rural and urban landscape in the Paphos district. The work navigates through personal geographies into collective histories of migration and belonging.