Artist-in-Garden: Demetrios Narvas
April & May 2025
Demetrios Navras is a queer dance artist and environmental scientist from Crete and is researching the project ‘TARAHI’ – Greek for anger, disorder, physiological disturbance, turmoil, political confusion, tumult, uproar – during a two-week residency at HELLERAU’s Kulturgarten in April and May:
Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s text ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, TARAHI explores the garden as a queer feminist technology – a carrier bag that holds important stories of vulnerability, interdependence and care, while revealing the entangled relationships between human and non-human actors beyond human control and intentionality. Gardens embody stories of a constant flow of life and death, stories of quiet yet radical change – of small upheavals.
Within the research, Demetrios Navras attempts to connect the garden to queer spaces and queer temporalities, imagining how the garden can foster community, resistance and decolonial practices. Glitch aesthetics are applied to the plants, the water and the non-human interactions in the garden.
Demetrios Navras (they/she/he/it) is a queer dance artist, Environmental Science graduate, and witch from Crete, whose work moves between dance, digital media, and ritual. Their artistic practice explores queer temporalities, post-humanism, and the fluid intersections of nature, technology, and magic. They have performed and co-created in numerous productions, including “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (Gropius Bau, Berlin), “Zweiter Versuch über Das Turnen” (Impulse Theatre Festival), “Pulse and An Der Schwelle” (Alte Feuerwache, Cologne), “Kranich” (Tanzhaus NRW) and “Beyond the Threshold of I” (Studio ProArte, Freiburg) and Pink Water (Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum). Their solo work “There Is No Other Troy For You To Burn” merges rituals, computer glitches, and the non-human, while “Training For No Future” examines queer embodiments and the instability of a collapsing extractives capitalism. Through movement and interdisciplinary experimentation, Demetrios engages with themes of decoloniality, transformation, and the body as a site of resistance, challenging dominant narratives and reimagining new ways of being.
