NEOFYTOS is a cultural organization working at the intersection of contemporary art, disability culture, research and access. We make space for disabled people as creators, thinkers, performers, researchers and audiences.
Neofytos was created as an organization of culture dedicated to challenging confinement and exclusion through cultural creation, education, research, collaboration and disability awareness.
Its work brings together artistic practice, lived experience, scientific knowledge and practical accessibility — refusing the idea that disability should be kept at the margins of culture.
Read the story of Neofytos →DIS Festival brings artists, audiences and communities together through performance, visual arts, workshops, conversations and accessible cultural experiences. Founded in Larnaka, DIS creates space for disability-led artistic practice, collaboration and exchange across Europe.
Explore the festival, its artists, open calls, past programmes and evolving archive.
A new chapter of DIS, continuing the festival’s work around disability culture, artistic collaboration, participation and access.
The first chapter of the Dystopia trilogy, Il Paradiso is an original autobiographical and confessional work written and performed by Marianna Pafiti.
Through personal testimony and performance, the work transforms lived experience into a theatrical exploration of disability, identity and memory.
Direction & Visual Curation: Loucas Ioannou
Music: Maria Zannetou
Costumes: Romina Polimniou
Graphic Design: Giannos Christoforou
Dystopia: Inferno is an original theatre work by Marianna Pafiti and part of the Dystopia trilogy. Through the relationship between a woman with a disability and her caregiver, the performance explores dependency, isolation, memory, and the need for freedom.
Credits
Text / Performance: Marianna Pafiti
Direction & Visual Concept: Loucas Ioannou
Original Music: Ioannis Schizas
Recording & Mixing: Yiannos Lakkotrypis
Sound Recording / Production: Christos Krasidis
Production: Neofytos Cultural Organization
When asking for care becomes an act of resistance.
Inspired by Marianna Pafiti’s own disability-rights activism, (Protest) – Dystopian Version follows Thekla, a disabled woman imprisoned for demanding the support required to live with dignity. Blending autobiography, political theatre and dystopian fiction, the work confronts institutional neglect, silence and the struggle for disability rights.
Text, performance & concept: Marianna Pafiti
Direction & visual concept: Loucas Ioannou
Audiovisual design & scenic space: Rebecca Taki
Music: Ioannis Sxizas
Neofytos Cultural Organization Archive
Theatrical Reading
Disability Stories is an archive of lived experience transformed into theatrical reading — bringing personal testimony, memory and disability into a shared cultural space.
Through spoken word and performance, the project gives narrative presence to experiences that are often overlooked, creating a space for listening, recognition and dialogue.
Text: Marianna Pafiti
Director: Loucas Ioannou
Music and Sound: Ioannis Sxizas
The “Dis” Group Art Exhibition was a contemporary art exhibition organised by the Neofytos Cultural (Disability) Organization in collaboration with the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts (E.KA.T.E.).
The exhibition brought together artists to explore disability, difference, identity and social inclusion through contemporary artistic practice and the social model of disability.
Instagram ↗
In The Journey, Marianna Pafiti reflects on two decades of living with multiple sclerosis, tracing not only what illness and disability took away, but also what they revealed, transformed and made possible.
Rather than presenting disability as an individual tragedy, Pafiti turns her own experience outward and asks what genuine inclusion requires from everyone else. Her story becomes a wider reflection on the physical, social and emotional barriers that disabled people encounter, and on the assumptions that continue to shape how disability is understood.
Through moments of loss, adaptation, frustration and resilience, The Journey explores what it means to rebuild a sense of identity when the life once imagined is no longer possible in the same form. Pafiti writes about learning to navigate a world that is often designed without disabled people in mind, while also discovering new ways of understanding independence, strength, vulnerability and belonging.
At the heart of the book is a challenge to the idea that inclusion is achieved simply by offering sympathy or making occasional accommodations. Pafiti instead invites readers to consider accessibility as a shared responsibility: something that must be built into workplaces, public spaces, relationships, attitudes and everyday decisions from the beginning.
Her personal experience therefore becomes more than a story about living with multiple sclerosis. It is also a call for greater awareness, empathy and meaningful change. By speaking openly about the realities of disability, Pafiti asks the audience to look beyond diagnosis and limitation, to recognise the whole person, and to imagine a society in which disabled people are not merely accommodated but fully included, respected and able to participate on equal terms.
Ultimately, The Journey is about transformation. It acknowledges the grief that can accompany profound change without allowing that grief to define the entire story. It is a reflection on adapting to uncertainty, finding possibility within altered circumstances and recognising that a meaningful life does not depend on fitting a single idea of what a body, a career or a future should look like.
Watch on YouTube ↗
Through ceremonial improvisation, eutopia brings together references to the mandala, magic carpet, prayer, Abstract Expressionism and ecclesiastical space. Rather than imagining an unattainable utopia, the work proposes a more tangible idea of eutopia — a desirable human condition grounded in respect, solidarity and connection.
At once a space, a link and a symbolic “magic carpet,” the installation invites each viewer into a personal and collective experience of reflection and transformation.
Presented at Kastelliotissa Hall, Nicosia, from 27 March to 8 April 2024.
English booklet ↗Named in memory of Neofytos Antoniou, the organization carries a name that speaks both to exclusion and renewal.
In Cyprus, the figure of Saint Neofytos and his life in seclusion gives the name a historical connection to confinement. At the same time, its Greek root, φύω / φύομαι — meaning to grow or to be born — points towards emergence, transformation and new beginnings.
This dual meaning reflects the organization’s purpose: to challenge exclusion while creating space for growth, participation and change.
Neofytos works to strengthen Disability Culture, challenge social isolation, expand access to education and cultural participation, build international collaborations, support research and promote greater public understanding of disability.
Through art, education, advocacy and dialogue, we work towards a society in which disabled people are not simply included, but are active creators, participants and contributors to cultural and public life.
Disability, confinement, death.
By Loucas Ioannou
A visual art exhibition by Loucas Ioannou, inspired by the dystopia of disability and by death. Disability is approached as a dystopian condition, with the confinement experienced by many disabled people interpreted as the alter ego of death.
The work draws on the idea of dystopia as a catastrophic vision of collective reality and retains the Dantean Inferno of the original theatrical text in the exhibition title. Through this connection, the exhibition explores control, the exercise of power and the deprivation of personal freedom.
Rather than imagining a distant future, the work turns toward a dystopia that is already present. Dante’s Inferno becomes a reference point for an endless cycle of suffering, while the exhibition develops into a broader study of death: death as a natural end, as a condition imposed by failing health, as a shadow over the contemporary world, and as a metaphysical release from the authority of the body.
This idea is expressed through the notion of “dystopian entelechy” — a reversal of the Aristotelian concept of fulfilment, in which completion is imagined as liberation from matter itself.
Curators: Katina Kosta & Loucas Ioannou
Creative Team: Ioannis Schizas & Rebecca Taki
Organised by: Neofytos Organisation for Culture (Disability)
Supported by: Cultural Services of the Deputy Ministry of Culture
Venue: gARTen ArtSpace, Georgiou Malikidi 27, Limassol 3040