THERE IS AN ISLAND III: Side Event
May 13 | 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Maria Christodoulou and Antonis Sideras present Voices of Home & Viper in my grave at Cyprus House.
THERE IS AN ISLAND III: Side Event
Voices of Home & Viper in my grave
Wednesday 13 May | 6:00pm–8:30pm | Cyprus House, London
Maria Christodoulou and Antonis Sideras present Voices of Home & Viper in my grave at Cyprus House.
Join us at Cyprus House for a special double presentation within the framework of THERE IS AN ISLAND III, bringing together two powerful contemporary voices from the Cypriot diaspora.
This evening unfolds across installation and live performance, exploring themes of home, memory, trauma, and identity through sound, poetry, and visual art.
🎧 Maria Christodoulou
Voices of Home: women and everyday life in Cypriot culture
An immersive audio installation that recreates the atmosphere of a traditional Cypriot household in the UK. Through intimate recordings of women and girls in their homes, Christodoulou invites audiences into a living archive of multigenerational domestic culture and memory.
The work explores how Cypriot traditions are carried, reproduced, and reimagined in the diaspora, foregrounding the central role of women in sustaining cultural continuity. Visitors move through a multi-sensory soundscape that highlights everyday rituals as acts of preservation and resistance.
📜 Antonis Sideras
Viper in my grave
(Performance-lecture begins approximately 6:30pm)
A performance-lecture and book-handling event marking the first public presentation of Sideras’ six-metre-long scroll of handwritten poetry and drawings.
Viper in my grave traces the artist’s lived experience of growing up queer in Cyprus alongside the generational trauma of being a first-generation refugee (1974). The viper emerges as a powerful metaphor for trauma embodied: coiled within the self yet capable of transformation.
Through poetry, visual narrative, and live engagement with the work, Sideras shares a deeply personal yet culturally resonant journey of confrontation and liberation.
Together, these two projects create a dialogue between the domestic and the embodied, between women’s collective memory and queer personal testimony, between inherited history and contemporary self-making.
The evening will conclude with opening remarks and a drinks reception.