CCFTin Nicosia, Cyprus

 

Creative Centre for Fluid Territories:  People–place–processes

CCFT in Nicosia 2016

Schedule of Presentations:

Professor Hadjichristou has designed the format of the day as a series of 10 minute presentations grouped according to the three key research questions that CCFT has identified.  Each block of presentations will be chaired by a CCFT member and after the presentations they will lead a Q&A session with the presenters, identifying the key issues arising, with a more general plenary session at the end of the day. CCFT is planning to establish a web presence for the colloquia on which we hope to publish details of the Nicosia colloquium in the form of Abstracts of each of the presentations, appropriate permissions being granted.

 

12:00  Welcome – Alessandra Swiny, Head of the Architecture Department, University of Nicosia

 

12.10  Introduction to CCFT and Colloquium – Susan Brind and Jim Harold

 

Session 1 – Chaired by Ana Souto

Question: In what ways does a nomadic and dialogic encounter with other place(s) deepen cultural, philosophical and political understanding?

 

12:20   Duncan Higgins:  What is unloud?

 

12:30   Nilly R Harag:  Liminal Plot

 

12:40   Maria Hadjimichail:  Tamed and Untamed Commons: Examples from the Nicosia Buffer Zone, from the Home for Cooperation to the Occupy Buffer Zone

 

12:50   Jim Harold:  Caesura:  Cyprus–Kibris–Kypros ... moving through empty areas and fractured zones:  the demilitarised UN Buffer Zone, Cyprus

 

13:00   Yiorgos Hadjichristou :  Redoing the Demos

 

13:10-13:40  Q & A

 

13:40-14:25  BREAK

 

Session 2 – Chaired by Shauna McMullan

Question: How can the complex histories held in the landscapes of places be visually represented?

 

14:25   Maria Hadjisoteriou and Angela Petrou+Unit 6:  SITES OF MULTIPLE IDENTITY_ THE CASE STUDY OF NICOSIA UNIT 6 Fieldwork research

 

14:40   Ana Souto:  Architecture Encaged – Engaged Architecture.

 

14:50   Veronika Antoniou and Claudia Konyalian:  Space+People=Place

 

15:00   Abienne Hoelzer:  Infrastructure, networks, and alliances. Approaches in implementing urban design, urban regeneration and urban planning

 

15:10   Alessandra Swiny:  Human Topographies – Emerging Identities

 

15:20   Athinna Papadopoulou:  Nicosia Master Plan

 

15:30  Q & A

 

16:00  BREAK

 

Session 3 – Chaired by Duncan Higgins

Question:  Can creative practices transform places or our perception of them?

 

16:15   Nikos Philippou:  Coffee-houses/ Place/ Objects/ Identity

 

16:25   Shauna McMullan:  Pause; a year in rubble; a work in progress.

 

16:35   Despo Pasia:  Monuments that Move: Reco(r)dings, Replays and Reactions

 

16:45   Susan Brind:  Notes from the ‘Coffee Series’

 

16:55   Ed Carroll:  Cabbage Field, Kaunas

 

17.05  Q & A

 

17:25-17:40  Concluding remarks


CCFT in Nicosia 2016

 

Colloquium Abstracts:

 

 

Session One

 

• What is unloud?

Duncan Higgins, Professor of visual arts, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University and KHiB, Bergen, Norway

 

Unloud utilises artistic research to articulate and contribute to the dialectic narratives that are forming from the legacy of particular Soviet histories and current narrative episodes. This is situated through a unique study of The Solovki archipelago, site of the most sacred founding Russian Orthodox monastery and also Stalin’s ‘mother’ of Russian gulags. unloud is contesting how to (re) integrate images and actions through art into historically active conversations concerning historical and contemporary experiences of violence, conflict and displacement. In particular how the production of artefacts can offer ways to see art as an agent or catalyst and source of understanding for social change.

 

Duncan Higgins – One-person exhibitions 2017-19 start at Bloc Gallery Sheffield, then National Museums in Riga, Kaunas, Helsinki and Solovki - subsequent publications and web presence.
Formative exhibitions of unloud include; The Bag Factory Johannesburg 2016, The Lithuanian National Gallery of Art Kaunas 2012 Czech National Centre and Russian Centre for Culture and Science, Prague 2012 Royal Festival Hall and South Bank Centre London 2009. Publications include unloud - RGAP and Cornerhouse Manchester 2013, What is unloud? KHiB 2008. unloud has been supported in 2005 through a 3year NESTA Fellowship. On-going commitment to research informed teaching and publication in a variety of international education institutions.

 

 

• Liminal Plot

Arch. Nilly R Harag, Institute: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem

 

The point of departure of the architectural project is the integration of the “physical wondering” and the “mental journey” in and between architectonic spaces. I approach architecture with theory and criticism that grasp architecture as an intermediate situation, or a “third entity”. My intention is to create a space between physical boundaries, without transitions involving divisions, walls and opposing narratives. By liminality I mean a kind of reality in formation and a fertile space for sense experience and analytical thought, an infrastructure for any creation whatsoever, and for architectural productivity in particular.

 

Nilly R Harag – is a senior lecturer at the Architecture Department at Bezalel and a co-founder of Arctic Architects in Jerusalem. She chairs the research unit Liminal Architecture. MArch University of Pennsylvania with honors; BDes Bezalel Academy with honors. Recipient of research grants from the TU WIEN Faculty of Architecture and Planning, the Freud Institute Vienna, the Oslo School of Architecture and Granada University. Visiting professor at Carleton University, the Architecture Department of Braunschweig University, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris Malaquais, and the Architecture School, University of Nicosia.

 

 

• Tamed and Untamed Commons: Examples from the Nicosia Buffer Zone, from the Home for Cooperation to the Occupy Buffer Zone

Dr Maria Hadjimichael, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus

 

When the first checkpoints opened the once silent from human life strip has started being transformed into a space with multiple ecological, social and political identities in which new commons arose. Some commoning practices are given more space than others and this will be the focus of this presentation.

 

Dr Maria Hadjimichael – is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus focusing on the governance of the commons through a lense of social and political ecology. The main focus of her research is the understanding of the sea and the ocean as commons, the historical process behind its commodification and appropriation and the processes of deconstructing this hegemonic process by society though her study processes of commoning beyond the maritime realm. She is a co-organizer of the UCY 'Summer School in Peace and Conflict Studies' and vice chair of the EU funded OceanGov COST network. She is an active member of different citizen initiatives dealing with issues of environmental and social justice and the editor of the website reclaimthesea.org

 

 

• ‘Caesura:  Cyprus–Kibris–Kypros ... moving through empty areas and fractured zones:  the demilitarised UN Buffer Zone, Cyprus’

Dr Jim Harold, Artist & Visiting Lecturer, Glasgow School of Art

 

Both the Buffer Zone landscape and its photographic depictions have a disquieting silence, an edgy and resistant muteness caused by the fracturing of time and cultural narratives. This paper touches on the nature of this muteness; on the disruption to social/cultural narratives as a result of human dislocation; and, with the absence of people, the curious appearance of a returning, if misshapen idyll to the landscape.

 

Woven into this paper is an exploration of the relation between the Buffer Zone landscape and the photograph, as it moves through various ruptures from 'real' physical space towards a place circumscribed by ideologies that stretch beyond its actual limits to end in the photographic depiction. This is a process that might superficially lend the image the appearance of a readable and explicable document, whilst actually evidencing the rupture as something unreadable and unknowable.

 

Dr Jim Harold Studied Fine Art at Reading University, and has a doctorate from Glasgow University for his research into the comparative analysis of the poetics of the desert and of desert spaces in the literature of Arab and European travellers.  He has worked extensively as a lecturer and senior lecturer in Fine Art at a number of UK institutions. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, and he has work in public and private collections in Australia, the USA and the UK, including the Arts Council of England and the V&A Museum. His practice focuses upon our understanding of landscape and considers the way that 'value' has been placed on certain types of land or landscape experiences: in particular, the question of marginality in those areas of land that exist at the edge or at the limit. Published works include:  ‘Caesura: Cyprus–Kibris–Kypros’ in Interstices, ‘The Drouth’, Issue 54, Winter/Spring 2016; ‘Witnessing the Momentous:  Crowds, Stones and Images, Silent Witnesses’ in Tanya Leighton & Pavel Büchler (eds) Saving the Image: Art after film, CCA, Glasgow/MMU, Manchester 2003;  and Desert, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 1996.

 

 

• Redoing the Demos

Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Architect, Professor, University of Nicosia

 

The conventional way of understanding the limits and the definitions of the properties is irreversibly shaken by the ever growing porosity of the dividing ‘Green line\ and the imminent resurrection of the ‘ghost city’ of Famagusta. The situation is further aggravated by the unprecedented phenomenon of the crisis in the island, that triggered the Neoliberalism’ stealth revolution as eloquently rendered in the ‘Undoing the Demos’ by Wendy Brown. All these set the premises where social ritual scenographies together with ‘spontaneous urban landscapes’ of ‘momentary relationships’ render a future of the built- and unbuilt realm where the main focusing point will be redirected to the human and the social.

 

Yiorgos Hadjichristou – is an architect and Professor of the Department of Architecture, University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He received his MA in Kiev and continued his research in Kyoto. He is the recipient of a number of national and international awards including the Golden Prize of the UIA, Union of International Architects for the competition for the most public, friendly and accessible buildings. He was selected and participated in the Mies Van Der Rohe Awards six times. He organized and participated in a wide spectrum of local and international exhibitions and events including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Milan Trienale.

 

 

 

Session Two.

 

• SITES OF MULTIPLE IDENTITY_ THE CASE STUDY OF NICOSIA

UNIT 6 Fieldwork research

Maria Hadjisoteriou, Angela Petrou Architects –Associate Professor and Assistant Professor- tutors of the unit 6  ‘TIME Synergies_ ADAPTIVE Architecture’, University of Nicosia,

 

The authors will present potentials of urban hybridity that emerge through exploring sites of multiple identities. The site of study is a part of the area along the buffer zone of in the old city of Nicosia. This area is supposedly a “Dead Zone” that separates the northern occupied area of Nicosia from southern part of the city. The buffer zone has a unique and ambiguous ‘core’, while at the same time distinctive urban characteristics have developed along both edges of the two inhabited areas of the divided city. 

The point at which these urban qualities overlap is of interest to us, creating points or sites of intensity, and often contestation. We examine the transient qualities of the “abandoned backyard” of the city, characteristic of the merging of both lived and vacant edges of the buffer zone. Our research identifies these instances of intensity as sites of hybridity and therefore, possible urban opportunity.

 

UNIT 6 Student Presentation Site Works:  Seeing Activities from the Ground

Unit 6 Explores Sites And Spaces Of Multiple Identities. Through A process of disassembling we re-examine space and place by searching for the invisible and the non-measurable. The mapped site is marked with lines drawn in reference to events across time and space, Everyday history is unravelled through the literature of the streets, and everyday stories of inhabitants. The site is understood and recorded from a grassroots perspective, a new site is discovered.

 

Representations of the site do not create a hierarchy of information but convey a bottom up order appropriate to the way the site is investigated. The processes of mapping and reading extend and enrich our interaction with the specific conditions of the site and allow the reader to understand and experience the unique characteristics of the place.

 

Angela Petrou – is an Assistant Professor in the Architecture Department at the University of Nicosia. She completed her architecture degree, post graduate diploma and professional (RIBA Part III) examinations in London, where she was born and lived until 2001.

Practice work has involved an extensive range of projects and scales, both in London and Nicosia, including; Competitions, Independent practice, Project Management and Interdisciplinary design Collaborations. She began teaching in 1996 at Kingston University and Southbank University in London. She subsequently taught as adjunct faculty at the University of Cyprus from 2006, joining the University of Nicosia in 2010.

Research interests are focused on Theories and methods of archiving city histories and activities particularly in how maps define public spatial relationships.  Research work tries to identify data exploration as a process over data presentation as a product. Research is design orientated working with the drawing and archiving process itself as a research activity.

 

Maria Hadjisoteriou – is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Nicosia. She was born in Nicosia, studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A) where she received her Diploma in Architecture, Dip-Arch (5 years diploma). Maria was awarded the “Monbusho” Japanese Scholarship for her postgraduate and Master Studies in Japan (Mie University). Japan and eastern culture and perception highly influenced her professional work and research as well as the way she views life. Maria’s main focus is “research by design”; therefore parallel to her academic involvement, Maria has been a practicing architect since 1995. She participated in a number of competitions in collaboration with other architects, in Cyprus and abroad, where she was awarded with a number of prizes, including the first prize of the Town Hall of Athienou; 2nd prize of the urban project “the development of the historical center of Ayia Fila”, the «runner up» prize for the entry “sub-terra supra-terra” for Europan 9 (European urban competition) in the city of Clermont-Ferrand, France that concluded in a 9 months urban workshop with the municipality. Maria represented Cyprus in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008 with the team project ‘Easylove’. She was involved in two major public projects in Cyprus, the one was the “development of the master plan of Dali” under an Island-wide program initiative to employ architects & urban planners to re-think, re-design & re-vive struggling regions, and the second, the “Urban Renewal of Ayia Fyla Historic centre in Limassol”, that aims to reinforce the traditional village centre. Maria’s current research interests include social sustainability in an urban context, seen from the viewpoint of programming, multi-functionality, user centre design and ephemerality. Urban awareness and the importance of landscape urbanism in the way we approach the design of the cities, is a major factor that is evident in her work. Parallel to the above, the investigation on “innovative living conditions and the intangible qualities in architecture”, issues that relate closely to the importance of perception in the design process, the treatment of boundaries, the notion of “Ma” (Gap, Interval), the threshold between the public and private, as well as “programming” as an important social factor is a key driving force for Maria’s Research.

 

 

• Architecture Encaged – Engaged Architecture.

Ana Soto, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment. Nottingham Trent University.

 

This presentation provides the context and background for the “Hanging Lecture”, displayed as part of the group exhibition. It revolves around issues of identity, memory, engagement and representation; architecture as material culture that enables or prevents communication and interaction.

She did her first degree in Madrid (Spain) in Art History, complemented with a PhD on architectural history (UNED, Spain, 2005), and a PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of Nottingham (2007). Ana has been a Lecturer in the School of Architecture at NTU since 2007.

 

Ana Souto's – research interest lies in architecture as a cultural manifestation of national identity. She has investigated this connection in Mexican and Spanish architecture, as well as the associations between memory, identity and architecture, with an especial interest in post-1989 Germany. Ana is currently developing new participatory mapping methods leading to co-production of knowledge, using both local and international case studies.

 

 

• Space+People=Place

Veronika Antoniou and Claudia Konyalian Architect, Co-Founder at Urban Gorillas + Cultural Project Manager at Urban Gorillas)

 

The presentation will explore the thematic of space and place through implemented projects and processes adopted by Urban Gorillas for the regeneration of public spaces in Cyprus.

 

Urban Gorillas (UG) – is a non-profit organization run by a multi-disciplinary team of urban enthusiasts who envision healthy, creative and socially inclusive cities. UG contributes to sustainable urban living by enabling projects and actions that bring new energy and instigate change in city spaces and communities. UG transforms public spaces into lively and innovative hubs, cultivates civil society and impacts policies. UG fulfils its mission through pilot activities and concrete actions, extensive research, and bottom-up, low-cost, high-impact techniques. UG works with communities, NGOs, municipalities and institutions to foster tangible social transformation and bring forward new models of citizen participation.

 

 

• Infrastructure, networks, and alliances. Approaches in implementing urban design, urban regeneration and urban planning

Fabienne Hoelzel, Fabulous Urban.

 

Against the backdrop of two-third of the overall population in Lagos living in poor and underserviced neighborhoods, limited funding and overwhelmed governments at all levels, low-tech, low-cost, strategic and precise intervention may be an approach: 'Game-changers' are tailor-made to individual people and to an individual living culture, yet they address larger, systemic problems.

Fabienne Hoelzel – founded FABULOUS URBAN, a design, research and planning practice for less developed regions, after working for one of Latin America‘s largest slum-upgrading programs as the head of the urban design and planning team at the Social Housing and Urban Development Authority of São Paulo, Brazil, that was awarded in 2012 the UN Habitat Scroll of Honor for its pioneering work. Fabienne holds as well a senior research position at the Institute of Urban Design at the ETH Zurich and is an associated lecturer for urban design at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She lectures and writes on a regular base. FABULOUS URBAN is currently involved into the Makoko Regeneration Plan, Lagos, Nigeria, that was shortlisted for the 2014 Fuller Challenge, and implemented recently the pilot "Makoko Neighborhood Hotspot"—some sort of multipurpose community center. The funds for the planned and attached biogas plant are currently being raised. Commissioned by the Heinrich Böll Foundation Nigeria, Fabienne coordinated and published the research study "Urban Planning Processes in Lagos. Policies, laws, planning instruments, strategies and actors of urban projects, urban development, and urban services in Africa’s largest city", in collaboration with local researchers and urban planning students of the University of Lagos. She was as well a consultant and author of "Open City Lagos", a project with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the NSIBIDI Institute. FABULOUS URBAN is further involved in a series of community empowering sanitation solutions in several slum areas in Lagos, in collaboration with the Nigerian Slum/ Informal Settlement Federation and JEI. As of August 2, 2016, Fabienne was appointed full Professor of Urban Design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts, Germany (commencement: March 1, 2017).

 

 

• Human Topographies_ Emerging Identities

Alessandra Swiny, Architect, Associate Professor, Head of the Architecture Department of the University of Nicosia

 

Is it possible for conditions of Crisis and Division, to lead to a new and positive ‘Emerging Identity’ and not to a negative one?

 

Various projects will be explored, which illustrate a series of multisensory experiences evoking a new urban condition, a liveable and realistic ‘dreamscape’ one could say. This new identity, influenced by social change, creates new communities that survive on the ‘fringe’, or on the edge, in extreme environments. They are created from human topographies, evolving human needs that echo the voice of an emerging identity, and a new living condition.

 

Alessandra Swiny – is the Head and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Nicosia, where she has been teaching since 2005 and is a tenured faculty member. She is an architect of American and British origin. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard/Columbia University (2000) and a Masters of Architecture from Harvard University (2004) in the United States. Alessandra was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Barnard/Columbia Colleges Architecture Program for Fall 2011. She was the principal architect with M. Hadjisoteriou at ‘Sub_Supra Studio’ from 2008 until 2013.

In June 2008 her winning entry (with M.Hadjisoteriou & A.Dimitrakopoulos) for ‘Europan 9 Competition’ in Clermont-Ferrand, France went into its second phase of design development. She has represented Cyprus in the Venice Architecture Biennale three times. This year she submitted the project, ‘Reverberating Courtyards: Carving Histories’ as curator with Y.Hadjichristou (team: A.Postekkis, P.Pavlidies, M.Georiou) and was in the final selection process.

From 2009 Alessandra participated in an Erasmus Intensive Program (completed in 2012) for the project ‘Demochange Cities’ with professors and students from Milan, Trieste, Hamburg, Cluj, and Vienna.

Alessandra is very passionate about the development of an architects’ education. Her design focus shifts from small scale detailing to issues pertaining to the larger urban context and articulates the importance and complexities of issues faced at all scales. She is currently Unit Leader of ‘In/Out Crisis’ (with Y.Hadjichristou and M.Georgiou) for 4th and 5th year Architecture students at the University of Nicosia. She believes that an equilibrium must exist between; functionality and creativity, as well as research, practice, technology, culture and wit; while always striving to have a minimum impact on the ‘environment’ and to design buildings that function as ‘intelligently’ as possible. In recent years her work concentrates on issues of emergency architecture.

 

 

• Nicosia Master Plan

Athina Papadopoulou - Architect / Planning Officer- Nicosia Master Plan Office

 

The presentation will give a short overview of the bi-communal Nicosia Master Plan and short profile of implemented and planned projects.

 

Athina Papadopoulou – is an Architect - Conservator with twenty-six years experience as a practicing architect. She has been working for the bi-communal Nicosia Master Plan projects since 1999.            For the past seventeen years her work has focused on urban regeneration projects, ranging from building restoration and reuse to urban scale interventions and regeneration- development strategy for Nicosia.

 

 

 

Session Three

 

• Coffee-houses/ Place/ Objects/ Identity

Nicos Philippou, University of Nicosia

 

The presentation explores the legibility of vernacular aesthetic(s) in the arrangements of objects within the space of the Coffee-house. These tableaux can be seen as manifestations of a general Cypriot vernacular culture and aesthetic but also as telling of the multiplicity of Cypriot cultures and ideologies. The walls of the coffee-houses are presented here as a contest ground for antagonistic ideologies, values and aesthetics.

 

Nicos Philippou – is a photographer with a strong interest in the Cypriot vernacular, topography and material culture. He has participated in several exhibtions in Cyprus and abroad. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition Re-envisioning Cyprus and co-edited the volume with the same title. In 2012 he participated in the exhibiton Sense of Place/ European Landscape Photography at the BOZAR in Brussels and in at Maroudia’s, a component of the major NiMAC exhibition Terra Mediterranea-In Crisis. In 2015 his book Coffee House Embellishments was shown in The PhotoBook Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. He is, also, the co-editor of  Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place, Identity. In 2016 NiMAC hosted his solo exhibiton Sharqi and published a photobook with the same title. His writings on photography and vernacular culture have been published in journals, art magazines and collective volumes. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia.

 

 

• Pause; a year in rubble; a work in progress.

Shauna McMullan, Lecturer, Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art, Glasgow School of Art.

 

This presentation will return to and remember images printed in the media over the past year to portray areas of destruction around the world (specifically architectural destruction). I want to think about how this ongoing collection of images become the source material for a series of artworks framed, informed and developed through my involvement with CCFT.

 

Shauna McMullan – was born in Northern Ireland and is based in Glasgow,. She is an artist and educator. She studied Sculpture in Cheltenham, England followed by a Masters Degree at Glasgow School of Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Shauna’s main areas of research are in community, mapping and place.  She is interested in the relationship between geography and art and wonders if it’s possible as an artist to employ the language of cartography to create alternative mappings or counter cartographies. At its core the work attempts to deal with the collision of these two fields.

She works as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art.

 

 

• Monuments that Move: Reco(r)dings, Replays and Reactions

Despo Pasia – museologist- museum educator

 

In 2014, within the curatorial project Treasure Island which took place at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Center (NiMAC), Lia Haraki delivered a performance called The Record Replay React Show. The performance related to the grand-scale Liberty Monument which stands in Nicosia and raised questions of historicisation, memorialisation and overcoming in the present of traumas routed in collective historical events in Cyprus.  During this talk, and by drawing on a number of examples from monuments in Cyprus and from around the world, I discuss performance as an ever-unfolding tool by which we can re-arrange and re-charge the living tensions between ‘enforcement’ and ‘necessity’, ‘stiffness’ and ‘flexibility’, ‘solidness’ and ‘fluidity’, materiality and human bodies.

 

Despo Pasia is a Museologist and Museum Educator. She is currently a PhD candidate at UCL – Institute of Education, University of London. Her doctoral research concerns the educational use of museum photographic archives and centres on a phenomenological investigation of children’s encounters with photographic constructions of gender in urban Cyprus. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions and has designed educational programs for museums in Cyprus and Greece as well as for Erasmus+ and Marie-Curie research programs. Her research interests include photography, hybrid displays, museum studies and museum education.

 

 

• Notes from the ‘Coffee Series’

Susan Brind, Reader in Contemporary Art:  Practice & Events, Dept of Sculpture & Environmental Art, Glasgow School of Art

 

Over a number of years, Brind and Harold have been collaborating on an artwork that takes the form of a series of letters that reference events witnessed since the turn of the 20th Century. They are written by an anonymous ‘I’, from different years and various locations, to an anonymous ‘You’, a beloved whose location is unknown. These letters reveal a tender relation reaching across continents that create a matrix of events and places, reflecting upon historical and current events.



 

Susan Brind Studied Fine Art at Reading University and the Slade School of Art.  Her work, which takes the form of sculptural, textual and time-based installations, plays on the tensions between rational forms of knowledge and the body as a site of understanding. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the UK, including a site-specific permanent commission for the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and her works are held in public and private collections in the UK and Australia. Her praxis has incorporated collaborative curatorial projects such The Reading Room (with Jane Rolo of Book Works, London, 1994) and Curious: Artists’ Research in Expert Culture (for Visual Art Projects, Glasgow, 1999). Published works include The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age (co-edited with Damian Sutton and Ray McKenzie, IB Tauris 2007). She is co-leader (with Dr Nicky Bird) of the Reading Landscape Research Group at Glasgow School of Art.

Exhibition and Colloquium (Presentations, Papers and Round Table Discussion)

 

Hosted in Cyprus by the Department of Architecture [ARC]

University of Nicosia

 

6 -13 November 2016

Exhibition: Susan Brind and Jim Harold, Duncan Higgins, Shauna McMullan and Ana Souto

(With contributions fromARC Students, Department of Architecture, University ofNicosia, and students from Institute: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem.)

Department of Architecture [ARC] University of Nicosia

CCFTin Nicosia

 

Colloquium (Presentations, Papers and Round Table Discussion)

 

Friday 11 November 2016

Hosted by the Department of Architecture [ARC]

University of Nicosia

 

Colloquium Outline:  Artists, architects, designers and cultural theorists from England, Scotland, Norway, South Cyprus and Lithuania have joined together at the Department of Architecture, University of Nicosia, South Nicosia in November 2016, under the umbrella of the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories [CCFT], with the aim of establishing an international inter-disciplinary research dialogue between their respective higher education institutions and invited external partners, including from cultural institutions and independent practitioners, to discuss current ideas related to questions of place identity.  

 

• CCFTMembers:

 

Susan Brind, Reader in Contemporary Art:  Practice & Events, Dept of Sculpture & Environmental Art, School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art (GSA).

Professor Yiorgos Hadjichristou, School of Architecture (ARC), University of Nicosia, Southern Cyprus.

Dr Jim Harold, Visiting Lecturer, Depts of Sculpture & Environmental Art, M Litt Fine Art Practice and Art & Critical Theory, School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art (GSA).

Professor Duncan Higgins, School of Art & Design, (Nottingham Trent University (NTU), and Bergen Academy of Art & Design (KHiB))

Shauna McMullan, Lecturer P/T, Dept of Sculpture & Environmental Art, School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art.

Dr Ana Souto, School of Architecture, Design & the Built Environment, Nottingham Trent University (NTU).

 

Ed Carrol, Independent Artist and activist, Kaunas, Lithuania.

Vita Gelūnienė, Independent Artist and activist, Kaunas, Lithuania.

 

[The Kaunas contributors participated in the Nicosia colloquium via Skype.]

 

• Invited collaborators to the Nicosia Colloquium:

 

Veronika Antoniou – Director of MAZA architect, Creative Director of the NGO Urban Gorillas

Maria Hadjimichael – Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental Governance and Governance of the Commons’

Maria Hadjisoteriou – Associate Professor, and Angela Petrou, Assistant Professor, architects and tutors of the unit 6 ‘TIME Synergies – ADAPTIVE Architecture’, University of Nicosia

Nilly R Harag – Arctic Architects, Head of Liminal Architecture Unit, Architecture Department, Bezalel Academy

Fabienne Hoelzer – FABULOUS URBAN

Claudia Konyalian– NGO Urban Gorillas

Athina Papadopoulou – Architect / Planning Officer, Nicosia Master Plan Office

Despo Pasia – Museologist, museum educator

Nikos Philippou – Photographer, University of Nicosia

Alessandra Swiny, Head of the Architecture Department, University of Nicosia

Marilena Zackheos, Director of the Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies, University of Nicosia

 

The Department of Architecture is gratefully acknowledged as the hosts of CCFT’s first international travelling colloquium, with special thanks to Professor Yiorgos Hadjichristou for curating and managing the whole event.  With thanks too to the artists who have contributed to the exhibition that accompanies and informs the colloquium.