Khalli il Kooti – Put the Box Down is a site-specific embodied choreographic walking experience through the city of Chania, moving between memory, absence, and the ghosts that linger within its urban landscape. Traversing the neighbourhood of Splantzia, the work enters into dialogue with the traces, bodies, and dances of Chania’s Muslim communities and the Halikoutides who were displaced after 1922, as well as with other Afro-Cretans who remained, while engaging with contemporary forms of displacement, erasure, and urban transformation.

Blending videowalk,storytelling, live and video performance, audiences are guided via their smartphones through a choreographed journey in which the material reality of the city intersects with archival images, soundscapes, and spectral presences that reveal its silent multiplicities.

In this way, Chania emerges as a living palimpsest—where different histories, place names, languages, and communities continue to coexist through the traces they have left behind. The city appears as a living body that mourns what has been lost, remembers what remains unseen, and carries within it the enduring presence of those who continue to inhabit it; a body that constantly resists and ceaselessly rewrites itself.