"I was embarrassed to call my mother in Albanian, I always did it in Greek."

BarcelonaTo say that Mario Banushi pays tribute to his mother in his new show, Mommy, which arrives at the Grec Festival after its international premiere at the Avignon Film Festival, forces us to ask: what mother? Banushi was born 26 years ago in Greece, the son of immigrants. When he was just eight months old, his mother took him and his sisters to Albania. There, his grandmother raised him until he was six, while his mother worked in Greece. "That builds your character; those are very important years," he says. Every summer, he traveled to see his father, stepmother, and the rest of his paternal family. "The fact that my parents are immigrants and that I come from two countries has affected my work and is one of the reasons why I do wordless shows, because I was always forced to choose: what is my language? What language do I dream in? What language do I like to speak? In the theater, I didn't have to choose," he explains. For him, the stories told to his family related to immigration sounded "like listening to Chekhov or Shakespeare." "They're like my classics," he reveals. She has decided to tell the world.

Banushi had already talked about the mother in her first show, Ragada, which he performed in the dining room of a friend's house in Athens during the pandemic. It addressed the mourning for his stepmother in Goodbye, Lindita, which catapulted him from the Greek National Theatre. And he closed the trilogy by talking about the absence of his father in Taverna Miresia, where he consolidated a method and a creative team – dancers, actors, musicians, set designers – that is now central to the Greek scene and emerging with force in Europe. And now his latest piece, Mommy (what does it mean mother in Albanian), which arrives at the Mercat de les Flors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, will travel around the world with a word that he did not pronounce: "I was ashamed to call my mother with the Albanian word, I always used the Greek word. And this title for me represents a goal I had as a child: not to be afraid of doing things.

The shyness with which Banushi speaks contrasts with the exposure of his intimacy he displays on stage. "I'll talk about my family until I no longer need to. For now, I'm inspired by speaking the truth. I don't know how to work with a written text," admits the author and director. In fact, he doesn't even rehearse from texts, but rather from drawings. His plays contain elements of Greek and Albanian folk tradition, touch on family themes, and feature images that function as hyperrealistic visions that are simultaneously strange and dark. "I like to speak with my eyes, with my body; I like silence. Not using words represents me; it's me. I don't do it so the play can travel, although it's true that it's a universal language. I love that everyone can see it, even if they might not understand everything," says Banushi.

The director defines his works as "open like a dream in which you don't understand exactly who you've seen and why you've seen them," he says. There is no conventional idea of characters. There is the role of the Mommy,But in reality, she's an archetype who represents "all the mothers and all the people" who raised her, she says. The author regrets that her work has traveled to Australia but not to Albania, Greece's neighboring country: "I don't think the situation is easy there, and even less so for the arts," she laments.