Does it become easier? Dealing with something so sensitive?

Does the pain ever go away?

Do you want it to go away?

Toughen up! Is it a good thing?

Can anyone really judge?

Do you have a choice?

Do we have a choice?

                                 Do I?

Are the memories a good thing?

That we are so attached?

If you are not part of it, why would you become part of it?

 

Anna Maria, Student, University of Nicosia, 11th November 2016.

 

Ana Souto, Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University, 23rd November 2016.

 

I have to be part of it, I do not have a choice. I actually do not want to even have that choice, it feels like a responsibility, even though it is not.

Memories are such a terrible thing, they are crude, they can be overwhelming, and at the same time, without them, we cannot be ourselves anymore. We either manipulate memories to make them more palatable, to be able to survive, or simply dismiss them, send them to oblivion.

But those memories, narrative, histories, are ever present, you just need to be prepared to see them, engage with them, feel with them. They might be tangible or intangible, “official” or emotional, they are simply there.

I should not be here

 

It is not my country, my language, my conflict nor my trauma. But I do not feel like a tourist, just enjoying the sun and the food, and the company. It is my first trip to Cyprus, looking for Erasmus agreements with the universities here. And I want to know more, and see more, and understand more. Even if it is not my ‘place’, even if I am in the buffer zone and I am not allowed in here, and I am not supposed to take a picture and ultimately share it with you… here I am.

 

25th-26th October 2019. On becoming the no-no-man's land. Generating the Urban Glendi

Buffer zone

No man's land

Fringe Festival

Men women and children change the meaning. It is not a no-man's land, a no-woman's land, a no-children's land

Temporarily inhabited, re-enacted as a public space

Home for cooperation

The Home Cafe

Feeling homely with a coffee and a feta and spinach pastry. And fresh pomegranate juice

Occupying the Buffer zone that is usually only patrolled by UN soldiers

Occupying military tents with our installations, prints, videos, postcards, conversations, our presence

Negotiating the dry (dead) environment with a temporary forest of cardboard installations and a grove of trees that claims our presence on the no-man's land

A temporary presence which was threatened by the unpredictability of the storms, rain that falls equally on the North and the South, and the Green Line

Negotiating the complex relationship between the occupier and the occupied, the occupation of military tents that protect dialogues, prints, performances that frame the boundaries of our presence, of the courtyard designed by the Urban Gorillas and Yiorgos Hadjichristou

And then we left. The no-man's land recovered its identity. No more men, women or children

Over three days we, visitors of this island within the island, exchanged voices and narratives, languages and performances

Nothing left but cardboard and the trees 

Only the memory of the performances, of the actual experience of transforming the dead zone into a vibrant space which embraces all

Only the struggles of those who organised it, who travelled from afar, who had to show their passport to get in, and out. And the ideas that became reality on those tents, cardboard structures, that 'Affective Garage' by Nihal Soganci, as a collective junction, or the mirror space that ARUCAD designed to force you to see the other. And the students' work from the University of Nicosia and University of Cyprus, and what it meant for them to be in the Buffer Zone: in and out of the (comfort) zone

This time we were allowed to be there, to take pictures, to share them with you. So here I am

Nicosia, Nottingham, November 2019.

[…] one has to accept the idea that one is putting one’s own identity to the side in order to explore the ‘other’

Barenboim, Daniel and Edward Said (Ed. Ara Guzelimian). Parallels and Paradoxes. Explorations in Music and Society, London:  Bloomsbury, 2004, 12.

Title: Urban Glendi (Curated by Urban Gorillas – Yiorgos Hadjichristou) 

Participants / performers: Urban Gorillas

Creative Centre for Fluid Territories – Duncan Higgins, Ana Souto, Jim Harold, Susan Brind, Shaunna McMullan, Johan Sandborg, Andrew David Lock, Linda Lien, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Petros Lapithis, Maria Hadjisoteriou.      

UNIC- Architecture Department of the University of Nicosia Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Maria Hadjisoteriou, Andreas Prokopio, Christos Xenofontos, Giorgos Kartsakas, Afra Omidi, Thomas Florentzou, Maria Kyriakou, Chrystall Koufopavlou, Christina Galanou, Stefanos Panteli

 

Behind a grove of plants and trees, a stage of a courtyard will be generated between two tents and the walls: an ‘Urban Glendi’ will be performed.

The tents will accommodate exhibition of the participants work as a hanging garden in dialogue with the mobile forest that will surround them. The courtyard will act as the environment where the ‘Urban Glendi’ will be celebrated with presentations and discussions. By the end of the event, the plants will be planted in the area of the Home of Cooperation.

http://www.home4cooperation.info/node/8795, last accessed 18/11/2019

Exploring the role of the 'self' and the 'other': Part 1 


 

Ana Souto

A sense of normality. It is warm, there is a nice terrace, why not have a coffee under the shade. Next to the Ledra crossing, by the buffer zone, with a tangible remain of the conflict as a background. A sense of normality, a familiar feature: the wall, the divided city. 

A wall is an angry piece of construction. A wall possesses no beauty or aesthetic sense. It divides rather than unifies. Why is there in the first place? Who is trying to keep whom out or who is trying to defeat whom? Almost from the moment of its birth, a wall is an insult to human freedom, a challenge to those whom it excludes. It was somehow calling out the ‘unbuilt’.

Birthler, Marianne, Lars Krukenberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit. Unbuilding Walls. From Death Strip to Freespace, Basel: Birkhauser, 2018, 49.

I never show bizarre or strange objects in my pictures… they are always familiar things, not bizarre but ordinary things are gathered and transformed in such a way that we’re made to think that there’s something else of an unfamiliar nature that appears at the same time as familiar things.

Magritte quoted in Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York: Semiotext, 1991, 36.

Title: The Affective Garage: A Collective Junction

Performer: Nihal Soğancı 

Country: Cyprus

An invitation to a collective and creative journey through a participatory installation to re-imagine the buffer zone as an in-between space through everyday objects flashing beyond the webs of memory.

http://www.home4cooperation.info/node/8795, last accessed 18/11/2019

The built environment is merely a prompt, a corporal reminder of the events involved in its construction, use and destruction. The meanings and memories we bring to the stones are created by human agency and remain there. These memories are, of course, contrasted and they change over time.

Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory. Architecture at War, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, 6.

27th October 2019. The day after. In the process of re-becoming a no-man's, no-women's, no-children's land

A frontier is not a wall, but a threshold. [...] So our ideal ought not to be a world without frontiers, but one where all frontiers are recognised, respected and permeable; a world, in fact, where respect for differences would start with the equality of all individuals, independent of their origin or gender.

Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London:  Verso Books, 2009, 15.

The Ethics of Fly-fishing

 

There are so many things I don't know about. Even when I learn about them, I still don't fully understand them. I didn't know anything about Agios Sozomenos in Cyprus nor the "Traffic of the North" in Norway, and its "Telavåg tragedy ", the so called memocide. I was not aware that something as brutal as a buffer zone could be invisible in the landscape of Agios Sozomenos. When tangible and intangible heritage entangled on visible and invisible memories, is it fair to bring those events back to the present? What is the ethics behind memory and remembrance?

 

Over two days we, the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories, occupied the deserted, remote, ruined village of Agios Sozomenos. We invaded it with installations, Russian whispers, strings from other lands; quiet dialogues with the landscape, rituals of some sort. And food, and songs, and walks, and talks, and memories. Other memories from afar and from not so far and yet a different land, a different language, a different other that makes me reflect on myself. Does that count as co-othering?

 

We come and go, nomads when we walk, when we talk and when we think and remember.

 

Over two days we occupied the idyllic, somehow remote village of Telavåg, in the periphery of Bergen, in the middle of Norway, the North Way, straight from the south, covered by the Saharan dust. Over two days we drove slowly, we listened, we talked, we drank nice cups of tea and ate comforting pancakes. We walked up and down the hilly landscape that always takes you to the water, those temporary paths or permanent creeks (or was it the other way around?), that always facilitate the access to the sea (or the Atlantic Ocean? We couldn't find a clear boundary on the map). Walks that remind you (or make you remember) that the sea was the way to freedom, the pathway of resistance. Retaliation.

 

These attempted memocides to erase Agios Sozomenos and Telavåg from history by destroying their built environment have promoted another form of memocide, a narrative that adds a constant tragedy to these remote villages in the periphery. They are forced to remember their tragedies, and this makes it rather difficult to move on, to enjoy, to live, to collect happy memories. Is it ethical to make happy memories in a village of tragedy?

 

What is the ethics of remembrance? "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory"[1]. What should be remembered? How and by whom? Who owns memory?

 

Mi case es su casa, they usually say in Mexico. I always wondered what the right translation is: my home is your home, my house is your house, or is it my home is your house? If I visit Cyprus with an Erasmus agreement, or Norway with a research grant, and I get a warm welcome, coffee and chats with friends, are you sharing your house or your home with me? Can I take part in your remembrance and support the narrative of victimhood and resilience, punishment and defiance? Am I disturbing your home with my presence, tracing back those walks that led the people to death, displacement, non-places? How do you feel when I visit, and then I go, not leaving a trace behind, just taking quite a few pictures, new friendships and ideas which will influence my teaching, research and approach to my own traumas?

 

The Fly Fishers’ International Code of Angling Ethics explains the importance of ethical behaviour. The catch and release philosophy is the hallmark of this federation. Catch and release. Is that the ethics behind Nomadic Dialogues? Do we catch, or even anchor for a while, certain memories, and then release? Are we demonstrating some sort of skills or techniques which can be applied to different locations, topographies, contexts? In certain lands people catch with artificial flies, but they do not release the fish afterwards. It would be cruel to let go of that damaged fish. It is more ethical to eat it for dinner.

 

Kant explained as part of the Categorical Imperative[2]: do the right thing for the right reason, because it is the right thing to do. Duty based ethics. Deontological. It is our duty:

Artists are voices, the voices are a kind of freedom, with freedom comes responsibility.    

 

Ana Souto, Bergen, 2018, Nottingham 2019.

 

 

[1] Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance”, American Literary History, 25 (1) 144–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajs069, 2013.

[2] Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals, Edited by Mary J. Gregor, Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

 

Peace2Peace is a bicommunal project of open-air crochet installations. The installations are created with the collaboration of Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot women to celebrate creative interaction, break stereotypes, degrade prejudices and build friendships. All who wish are welcome to join us!! CONTACT Elena Daniel elenad313@gmail.com

Places are contexts for remembrance and debates about the future, not symbols of memory or nostalgia.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, 77.

[…] Heritage provides the material means that enable one to connect with the past. And through such recognition – of loss, suffering, injustice – may emerge reconciliation.

De Jong, Ferdinand & Michael Rowlands. “Postcolonial Heritage”, Journal of Material Culture, 13 (2), 131-134, 2008, 131.