Costas Mannouris’s poems and Eugenios Gavriil’s images move from St James’s Square Garden into Cyprus House, an installation on memory and what words leave behind.
Rivers, the Cyprus High Commission’s poetry installation by Costas Mannouris, moves indoors to Cyprus House in St James’s from Monday 19 October to Sunday 29 November 2026. The illustrations of Eugenios Gavriil hang beside the poems.
The work began on 5 July in St James’s Square Garden as a site-responsive performance, conceived by Mannouris with the director Petros Charalambous. Its starting image is the dry riverbed: the places inside a person where words and memories once ran and now leave only a trace.
Mannouris came to verse from science. He studied biology and evolutionary ecology in the United States, then took a doctorate in the history and philosophy of biology at the University of Athens.
His first collection of poems, Oudeteron Imisy, appeared privately in 2014. Several of his plays have been staged by the Cyprus Theatre Organisation, and he has won two writing awards at the Cyprus Theatre Awards.
Indoors, the poems hang across the gallery, to be read at the visitor’s own pace. Two Sunday open houses, on 25 October and 29 November, add curated tours of the project’s origins and its poetry.