MAMI

MAMI  revolves around a word that means more than a person. Mother – in Mario Banushi’s work this word signifies origin and absence at once, care and burden, closeness and loss. The director and performer was born in Greece but spent part of his early childhood in Albania with his grandmother – a common practice at the time, particularly in large families, due to economic hardship – before returning to Greece at the age of six. In his latest creation, Banushi condenses personal memories into a poetic exploration of the relationships that bring life into being and shape it. MAMI  is a tribute to the women who raised us – and to the ambivalences bound up with this inheritance.

Drawing on his own experiences, Banushi creates a form of visual theatre of memory. The stage becomes a space of remembrance, familiar and uncanny at the same time. In silent, highly concentrated images, a chronicle of growing up unfolds – from early imprints of childhood through first experiences of love to the discovery of one’s own desire. Tenderness and loss, birth and impermanence, care and separation exist in a constant state of tension. Time appears stretched, suspended, as if following the inner logic of memory rather than a linear narrative.

A defining feature of Banushi’s work is the absence of spoken language. Bodies, gestures, music, light and colour carry the narrative. His productions emerge from an intense visual process and function like immaterial books that ask to be experienced rather than read. His stage spaces resemble estranged in-between worlds in which reality and symbolism imperceptibly merge. Rituals, offerings and everyday materials combine to form a poetics of the real, in which bodies, in their raw and unprotected presence, become images of striking emotional clarity. The music, strongly influenced by the Balkans, reinforces the ritual dimension of the performance, lending it an archaic yet contemporary quality.

Mario Banushi has gained international recognition for his wordless, visually powerful theatre works, for which he was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2026. With his debut Ragada and the subsequent productions Goodbye, Lindita and Taverna Miresia – Mario Bella Anastasia, he developed a distinctive form of visual theatre in which personal experience, ritual and collective memory intertwine. With MAMI, he continues this artistic trajectory, turning – after works shaped by farewell and mourning – towards life itself: towards birth, transmission, and the question of who carries whom, and at what cost.