Marina Xenofontos | Twice Upon a While

With Fire Boy on her back, Twice returns to places that evoke memories. She reacts to what she encounters, wanders, circles back, and returns again. Movement, repetition, and delay are not obstacles here – they are the structure through which she continues to exist. The game is imagined as an exploration of specific, timeless dimensions, allowing players to revisit past choices, reconsider decisions, or misremember coming-of-age events. Its development – realized in close collaboration with Pariah Interactive and others – involved countless back-and-forths, echoing the finished project’s cyclical structure and the multiplicity of outcomes it permits. We tested and refined the game through two demo days. One took place during the Onassis AiR Open Days, where friends and visitors engaged with the game on the third floor of the residency spaces, offering feedback on gameplay, glitches, and quest mechanics. Their responses guided incremental adjustments, shaping both the world we had built and revealing how the narrative unfolds in practice.

The second demo day occurred at a distance, in my hometown of Limassol, at the GZone Gaming Center internet café, where gamers and other visitors encountered the work within a more game-oriented environment. These moments of testing positioned “Twice Upon a While” as a collaborative project, one that emerged through exchange across different contexts and stages of development.

Following these demos, “Twice Upon a While” moves to an exhibition at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne as a finished work, accompanied by a publication produced by the museum and featuring an essay by Maya Tounta. A custom PC is currently being set up in Cyprus to run the game at the exhibition.

In her text, Tounta describes the game as a meditation on time rather than narrative: a portal into early adolescent experience, accessed from a continually renewed present. She observes how this logic extends from earlier gestures in my practice, such as acts of copying, wearing, remaking, and inhabiting materials as ways of rehearsing identity across time. In this reading, “Twice Upon a While” is not an endpoint but a “replayable present” – a space where looking replaces explanation, and where solitude, memory, and subjectivity remain open and shared.

During Onassis AiR, as the game reached a stage where it could be played by others, it became possible to examine more closely the relationship between player choice and events inspired by personal memory. While the work cannot alter the course of past events, it allows for their repeated activation, shaping present perception and recollection and suspending them in a parallel realm of continuous return. The residency thus became not only a site for technical development, but a space for further engagement with the project’s core concerns: temporality, agency, subjectivity, and the ways experiences – particularly formative or traumatic ones – are replayed across mental landscapes, resurfacing through interaction, misremembering, and repetition.