Mario Banushi - Chapter 1: Ragada

A leading figure of the new Greek theatre scene, Mario Banushi—awarded with the Silver Lion by the Biennale—presents, for the first time concurrently, the trilogy that brought him immediate recognition: Romance Familiare.

Ragada, Good Bye Lindita, and Taverna Miresia are the three chapters of a landscape of memory rooted in ancestral rites and traditions linked to Banushi’s Albanian childhood—a landscape entrusted, more than to words, to evocative images suspended between dream and reality, and charged with an emotional intensity that transforms intimate and personal themes—bonds and affections, a sense of loss and pain, nostalgia—into universal poetry.

Ragada, which in Greek means a tear or fissure, indicating a scar that may fade over time but never entirely disappears, tells the story of the mother, a woman who emigrated to Greece from Albania together with her husband and children. It is Banushi’s debut work, presented in an Athenian apartment during the lockdown in the form of fragments, now recreated specifically for the Biennale.