A sad ceremony evoking motherhood

Childhood is the realm of dreams. The kind you have as a child and the kind you remember as an adult. Childhood fuels the imagination, surfing between the visible and the incomprehensible, constructing imagined realities. And when this childhood is marked by the absence of a maternal figure, as in the case of the young Greek director Mario Banushi (26 years old), it's no surprise that he pursues impossible memory through art.

Mommy means mother in Albanian. The nationality of Banushi's mother, who left her with her grandmother to work in Greece and whom she saw occasionally. Banushi spoke about her mother in her first performance, Ragada (gap in Greek), from his stepmother in Goodbye, Lindita and from the father to Taverna Miresia. Mommy, the word he never said, is the exorcism with which all mothers are summoned. A ceremony about motherhood constructed from a series of silent tableaux that border on tenderness when the old mother's diapers have to be changed – like Romeo Castellucci in Sur le concept du visage du threads de Dieu, from 2011–; which evoke the sexual encounter between young people in Renaissance plastic paintings; which show the harshness of separation and loneliness and the mourning for the loss of a symbolic home. And all of them embraced by an exquisite soundtrack and a dreamlike texture, in a realistic stage space of a corner of a lost world where distant dogs bark.

A ritual of personal evocations open to the interpretation of the spectators, marked by the nakedness of bodies, the slowness of movements, the irruption of spiders, the lustful fight between two males, or the immersion in a bathtub of water –style Suz/o/Suz from La Fura dels Baus—all in a permanent darkness. It seems there's no joy, no color. On the contrary: there's sadness, melancholy, in that gaze of remarkable poetic value and meticulously stylized visual art that at times celebrates beauty but, at others, leaves us somewhat indifferent.