FIRST ENCOUNTER/2025

A banished creature conjures a deity, a hot boyfriend from the bowels of an island. Under terrible bright light, first light inspires desire. A mountain range becomes a shore becomes a core. Pleasuring and annihilating each other, they turn over to the heat and meet as if for the first time, forever.

First Encounter serves as the amalgamation of the two works that precede it Glieser (2025) and Late Matter (2024). The work maps a personal, ever-evolving cosmology, excavating and inventing ritual situations that transmute the materiality of the body. Through spatial composition, cultural references, and live music, the work weaves its own set of rules, physics, and space-time. These elements create situations that flirt with the dreamlike, transforming the scene into an ecosystem of pleasure and eternal return.

Note by Demetris: I started crafting this world three summers ago and it has seen many iterations since. The cosmology of this piece originates from the deep bowels of Cyprus: its scorching tropic of desire, deafening cicadas and heavy humid Augusts. It’s a ritual of immortalization, an encounter of oneself through another, and surrendering to being witnessed intimately. An exiled creature coming of ripeness desires moisture and conjures a hot boyfriend. A work that keeps reappearing in its most potent form each August.

Created and directed in collaboration and to the sonic universe of Quique.

US Premiere at Mabou Mines, New York, August 2025

EU Premiere at Ktirion53 in Nicosia, Cyprus, August 2025