MARIOS PAVLOU

​This 28-card deck is an exploration of bodies in motion: through space, through meaning, through the quiet and constant act of becoming. It draws from archetypal systems, but loosens them, allowing each gesture to slip beyond fixed identity into something more fluid.

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At its core, the deck is concerned with placement: where a body is allowed to be, how it is read when it arrives, and what it must negotiate to remain. Each card traces a relationship to space: not just physical environments like cities, rooms, thresholds but also social and symbolic terrains. Placement is never neutral here. It is shaped by power, visibility, desire, and refusal. To be placed is to be interpreted. To resist placement is to open new spatial possibilities.

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The deck moves through becoming: not as transformation toward a final form, but as an ongoing condition. Identity appears not as essence, but as event: something that happens repeatedly, differently, across time and context. Becoming is not a destination, but a practice of staying in motion, even when systems attempt to x the body in place.

 

Rehearsal runs through it all. The body learns itself through repetition: gestures, desires, roles performed until they feel natural. Yet rehearsal also allows for deviation: a misstep, pause, or shift that reveals the constructed nature of what feels given. The accompanying poems attend to these moments of slippage, where the script falters and something else begins to emerge.

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The cards do not offer resolution or instruction, but invitations: to notice how you are placed, how you are becoming, and what you might be rehearsing without knowing. They ask what it means to inhabit a body that is always in relation to space, to others, to systems and what might happen if that relation were reimagined, even slightly. 

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​“No origin. No end.

To speak in verbs that have no past tense.

Just a vagabond body misreading

a map on purpose.”

 

This were the first lines I wrote to accompany the first card from this deck. This card tells the story of the Runaway:

 

a body stepping into adventure, becoming a word, a character, a gap traveling in a book yet to be written. Each step I take is a soft, sweet betrayal of direction; each leaving is a becoming.

Lately, I think a lot about thresholds and containment—the spaces between rooms, borders, and selves, where meaning hasn’t settled. Like a road refusing to remember its own name, these crossings carry fragments of myself that remain unseen, forming narratives of desire, identity, and transformation.
 

Natural elements, language, and performativity merge as I mark the invisible boundaries within and around my body.

I ask myself:

 

How do I inhabit this wandering?

How do I touch edges and fold into openings?

How do I enjoy being wrong, and experience the quiet process of becoming—a body, a word, a leaving, a living room, a leaving Room?

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