John Costi: Becoming New

Somerset House Studios resident John Costi moves through his studio, floor to ceiling in collage and family ephemera, tracing the connections between his personal history and his art. We follow him through the making of his performance series Bapou's Bubbles for Somerset House Studios, where he and fellow performers embody a cast of characters drawn from his inner world, and onto the 263 bus to Costi Corner: a junction in North London where his family settled after emigrating from Cyprus, and a site he returns to across different phases of his life and work.

Through generous and personal storytelling, Costi shares moments from his complex past alongside a questioning and reshaping of inherited ideals of masculinity and class, demonstrating a new way of existing on his own terms, selectively taking and leaving what his environment has given him, without rejecting the core of his identity or heritage. This is a film about growth, dismantling inherited ideas, and the celebration of becoming.