Coming from the Soil marked the beginning of the programme. It involved the construction of a flower garden in the city centre, hosting beekeeping plants and soil from the greater Larnaka province. The garden’s composition changed naturally during the three weeks of the festival.
The first thematic week focused on soil-centred practices, starting with soil and all that emerges from it. The week hosted performances, workshops, and lecture-presentations by pioneering visual artists and researchers in the field, including Dr Joseph Hadjikyriakos, the Pleisure Collective of Sicily, researcher and lecturer Latifa Alkhayat from Bahrain, and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), curators and visual artists Meera Badran from the United Arab Emirates, Maees Hadi from Iran and Sweden, while the actions were accompanied by Dr Nikoleta Christodoulou and the children of the School of the Forest, Marissa Satsia and Antonis Tsiabarta, as well as landscape architecture students from the American University of Larnaka.
