DUENDE SESSIONS FESTIVAL

09/05/2026

MARIA BAKA +
STRATOS STERIANOS

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Maria Baka (GR)

Maria Baka is a poet and performer based in Athens. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. From 2018 to 2025, she served as co-organizer of Poetry Slam Greece. Her voice has crossed borders, resonating on stages in Greece, Spain, Berlin, and New York, where language becomes breath shared in real time.

Immersed in the living pulse of spoken word, she curates poetry events, edits books, works with illustration and video poetry, and facilitates workshops in creative writing and slam poetry, cultivating spaces where expression is both communion and uprising.

At the core of her poems and performances lie contemporary social realities and raw human emotion, shaped through a distinctly feminist lens. At the same time, she investigates the body as landscape and archive, tracing memory across skin, exploring vulnerability as language, and listening to the pulse beneath each line. For her, the body is not merely a subject, but a living text: a site of resistance, desire, fracture, and reclamation.

In 2022, she released her first poetry collection, “Borrowed Breaths”, published independently by Poetry Slam Gr. Her poems have also been included in anthologies across Greece and Europe, where her voice continues to unfold, intimate, political, and embodied.

Stratos Sterianos (GR)

Stratos Sterianos is a multimedium artist that lives and works in Athens, Greece. He has recorded and performed music/sound design for theatre plays,art performances and spoken word poets. Stratos has participated in several group exhibitions in Greece, Sweden, Ukraine, Egypt.

In his music we listen his influence from the Greek traditional music blend in with the electronic music from 90's and even earlier experimental bands.

Performance

A live performance where poetry meets movement, image, and electronic sound in a continuous act of becoming.

Spoken word, kinesiology, visuals, and live electronics with elements of traditional Greek music music enter into an ever-shifting dialogue, each form testing the edges of the other, dissolving boundaries, exchanging breath. The voice becomes movement; the body becomes text; light fractures into rhythm; sound acquires flesh. Nothing remains fixed. Everything responds.

Through this interplay, the performance explores the body as both instrument and archive, tracing contemporary emotions and social tensions across gesture, frequency, and image. It is an experiment in coexistence, where language pulses, movement speaks, and music listens, inviting the audience into a space where art forms collide, merge, and reinvent one another in real time.