THERE IS AN ISLAND III: Side Event

Voices of Home & Viper in my grave

Maria Christodoulou & Antonis Sideras

Wednesday 13 May | 6:00pm–8:30pm | Cyprus House, London

As part of THERE IS AN ISLAND III, Cyprus House presents a special evening bringing together two distinct yet deeply resonant artistic practices that explore memory, identity, and the intimate geographies of belonging.

Opening at 6:00pm, this parallel presentation invites audiences to move between two spaces — between the domestic and the embodied, between collective memory and personal testimony.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite. Places are limited and early booking is recommended.

Maria Christodoulou

Voices of Home: women and everyday life in Cypriot culture

In this immersive audio installation, Maria Christodoulou recreates the atmosphere of a traditional Cypriot household in the UK, transforming the gallery into a living archive of multigenerational memory. Through recordings of women and girls in their homes, visitors are enveloped in an intimate soundscape that foregrounds everyday rituals:  gestures of cooking, speaking, remembering, preserving.

At its heart, Voices of Home reflects on how traditions travel, how they are carried and reimagined in the diaspora, and how women sustain cultural continuity within domestic space. By centering female voices and lived experience, the work reclaims the home as a powerful site of transmission:  a space where identity is shaped, heritage safeguarded, and histories quietly endure.

Antonis Sideras

Viper in my grave

Beginning at approximately 6:30pm, Antonis Sideras presents Viper in my grave, a performance-lecture and book-handling event marking the first public presentation of their eponymous art book.

The work unfolds as a six-metre-long scroll of handwritten poetry and drawings, tracing the artist’s lived experience of growing up queer in Cyprus alongside the inherited trauma of being a first-generation refugee (1974). The viper becomes a visceral metaphor for trauma lodged within the body: coiled, persistent, and transformative.

Through poetry, visual art, and embodied narration, Sideras invites the audience into an intimate process of confrontation and liberation, where Cypriot cultural memory becomes both wound and remedy.

Together, these two projects form a dialogue between home and body, between women’s collective memory and queer personal testimony, between inherited history and contemporary self-making. The evening will conclude with short opening remarks and a drinks reception, offering space for reflection, conversation, and connection.

This side event expands the curatorial landscape of THERE IS AN ISLAND III, foregrounding voices that speak from within the domestic sphere and from within the body — reminding us that islands are not only geographic, but lived, remembered, and carried.