Maria Bregianni | Latent Structures

The project investigates the complex dynamics of intimate relationships and the patterns we inherit and repeat within them, exploring how roles emerge, mutate, and persist, often beyond our conscious choice. It seeks to shed light on the latent structures that shape the way we connect and relate to one another.

Using movement as a tool of inquiry, the duet-based project explores emotional codes embedded in physical habits and common gestures that carry subtle undercurrents of meaning. An embrace may hold both tenderness and withdrawal. A kiss may conceal a form of control. These familiar actions lose their conventional clarity, reflecting the instability and ambiguity of human connection, where opposing forces coexist. Borrowing from social dances and intimate interactions, the movement incorporates elements of conflict and martial play, yet all gestures are disrupted, distorted, and reassembled. The aim is to create a language in which contradiction is not resolved, but fully embodied.

Inspirations including the Theatre of the Absurd, which exposes the paradoxes of human interaction, the unsettling tableaux of Paula Rego, where intimacy blurs with violence, and the writings of August Strindberg, whose portrayals of romantic entrapment depict relationships as battlegrounds of identity and need, inform a non-linear physicality rooted in dissonance and fragmentation. This duet is a closed system that resists resolution, a fragile ecology in constant negotiation, of power, desire, support, and collapse, where roles shift continuously without ever settling.

Rather than seeking closure or moral clarity, this work aims to bring attention to the quiet mechanisms that bind people together, often in ways not fully understood. It examines the invisible architectures of need, control, intimacy, and fear that govern our lives.