Maria-Lusie Tzikas

Biography

Maria Lusie Tzikas (*1999 in Zurich) writes, photographs, and performs. Having grown up with German, Russian, and Greek as her mother and father tongues, multilingualism — and what remains unsayable despite everything — resonates throughout her work. She writes primarily about violence, its aftermath, and patriarchal structures in language, bodies, and relationships. She works across prose, poetry, and drama. In 2023, she completed her Bachelor's degree in Literary Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute and was supported in 2024/25 by the Swiss funding programme Dramenprozessor. In 2024, SRF broadcast her first radio play, Willkommen in Belleville, which won third place in the Short Drama Category at the 13th Grand Prix Nova. She is currently nominated for the Retzhofer Drama Prize 2027 with the text IF I WAS IN L.A. — a piece about overcoming identity politics in the face of gentrification and global change. Her texts have been published in, among others, the WOZ and the literary magazine zwischentext. She lives between Zurich and Bern. 

Artist Statement

I write about violence. Not about the spectacle, but about what remains when it is over: the silence, the speechlessness, the aftershock in the body. These tremors I translate into language – to create visibility for bodies affected by violence. I am interested in how patriarchal and structural violence lodges itself in language, how it lives on in gestures, conversations, relationships – and how we ourselves, often unconsciously, become part of it.

My texts emerge in the tension between reality and repression. I work with fragments, voices, overlays. Humor and bitterness are not opposites for me, but two sides of the same wound. A text can begin harmlessly, almost banal – and then tip, into the unspeakable.

Theatre, radio, and performance are spaces for me in which language is allowed to stretch, where the act of speaking itself becomes a body. I believe writing is a form of witnessing – not a report, but a repetition with a different intention. In my work I circle the unsayable by touch, until language is allowed to open again.