This is the question that runs through and animates this research and this creation.
A desirable future is not projected solely into a distant future or into grand heroic narratives. It is built through the quiet gestures of the present: remembering, passing things on, resisting, and nurturing connection.
Mara Kyriakidou is a puppeteer and multidisciplinary artist. She explores various forms of expression such as puppetry, photography, video, construction, sewing, and collective creation. Puppetry lies at the heart of her practice: it allows her to explore fragile states, to tell stories without necessarily relying on words, and to create spaces for poetry and reflection. She often works with people from very different backgrounds, guided by a logic of exchange, encounter, and sharing.
Her current work revolves around the notions of resistance, memory, and tenderness. Through Sempreviva, she questions what helps us remain standing, continue to believe, and create connection despite the harshness of the system in which we live and grow.
During this residency, she wishes to continue developing Sempreviva, a puppetry piece currently in the process of creation. This working phase will focus on deepening the writing, refining the staging, and exploring more precisely the sound and musical dimensions of the performance.
Together with violinist, improviser, and composer Dimos Vryzas, they will continue to weave a sensitive universe—a meditation on presence and absence, an echo of the fragile continuity between the human, the mechanical, and the natural.
This residency period will also make it possible to test new materials, experiment with the relationship between the body, the puppet, and space, and allow the form to evolve toward a more expansive version.
Research into the notion of resistance is never complete; it also extends through the development of artistic workshops linked to this theme, conceived as spaces for sharing, questioning, and collective expression.
Sempreviva is an attempt to create a sensitive space where traces, memories, and gestures of resistance resonate, and where tenderness becomes an active force.
Because to believe is to struggle. It is to stir, to think, to question. And perhaps, in this way, something can begin to bloom within us.