Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues: final group residency and closing festival in Kalavasos (Cyprus), curated by Xarkis.
As Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues moves towards its concluding chapter, which will take place in Turin in November 2026, all 22 artists involved in the project gathered in Kalavasos, Cyprus, for a final group residency leading to the closing festival, “Xarkis Festival 2026”, curated by Xarkis.
During the residency, the artists explored Kalavasos through the voices of former miners, archaeological sites, domestic archives, traditional craft practices, local herbs, silk cocoons, grain weaving, and images of Cypriot women filmed more than forty years ago. These encounters reveal how a place is continuously constructed and reconstructed through the relationship between people, material culture, memory, and space.
The residency became a space for dialogue between forms of knowledge that do not necessarily occupy the same position within the hierarchy of knowledge: archaeological and anthropological research engaged with knowledge embodied in practice; craft traditions passed down through generations encountered contemporary artistic research; individual memories intertwined with collective narratives.
At the heart of this process lies one of the fundamental questions of Contested Desires: how can artistic practice generate new forms of dialogue around the stories, identities, and desires that shape a place?
The history of Kalavasos – marked by millennia of copper extraction, mining, layers of colonial history, and processes of social transformation – becomes both a subject of inquiry and a starting point for new narratives.
The works emerging from this encounter will come together in the final festival: the works of the 22 artists involved in the project do not arrive in Kalavasos as foreign bodies, but emerge from a research process developed throughout the residency and shaped through encounters with the territory and its communities.
The festival is taking place from 11 to 13 September in Kalavasos: for three days, the village becomes an expansive exhibition territory, where museums, squares, courtyards, historic buildings, places of worship, and everyday spaces become sites for the production and sharing of artworks, performances, installations, screenings, workshops, and moments of exchange.
“Xarkis Festival 2026” thus engages with some of the central questions explored by Contested Desires: memory and forgetting, colonialism and decolonisation, exploitation, labour and solidarity, identity and belonging, heritage and representation.
Alongside archives and archaeological sites, the festival also recognises as forms of knowledge what lives within everyday practice: weaving, cultivation, plants, recipes, music, gestures, oral storytelling, and family memory. These forms of knowledge are often marginalised by official narratives, yet they are capable of preserving and transmitting other forms of history.
In this sense, the works do not necessarily seek to provide a definitive answer to the question, “How do we tell the story of a place?” Instead, they make visible its contradictions, gaps, and multiple possibilities for interpretation.
The Xarkis Festival is therefore a space where heritage is not simply preserved, but reactivated through new relationships, where memory is not an immobile repository of the past, but a living matter, continually rewritten by the present.
This is where the project finds its most radical dimension: in the shift from representation to relationship, from observation to participation, from understanding territory as an object of study to seeing it as a subject capable of producing knowledge.
Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues is funded by the European Union’s @creative.eu programme and realised in collaboration with: @d6_eu_, @xarkis__, @labonnebcn, @herengracht401, @muhnac, @MuseuNacional, @museodellecivilta, @proprogressione, @bjcem_aisbl, @museoegizio, @creativecourt._, La Fabrique Art Studio.
Associated partners: @d6culture, @larnaka2030, @cyprusuniversitytechnology, @fondazionesbac, @casa_arabe.
In collaboration with: @nubuke_foundation, @museodelamemoria, RMCG – @uniofleicester.
