Exploring Liminality in Cyprus: Spaces, Voices, and means of Expression

Jim Harold

Key words: Place Identity, Conflict Zones, Border Territories, Liminality, Peripheral Spaces and Voices, Access to Spaces, Right to Speak and Dissemination. This exposition explores concepts of liminality, access, and means of expression using the divided island of Cyprus as a main case study for analysis and reflection. The exposition is structured in sections or liminal means of expression, which are punctuated, interrupted and / or interrogated by "normative" voices such as "historical facts", definitions, museum displays, etc. published by voices of authority or agency: Poetic dialogues: These are descriptive letters, Coffee Letters, co-authored by Susan Brind & Jim Harold, written while travelling and in a state of liminality. The letters have no direct addressee nor any formal signing-off. They are intended as fragments of letters, and moments of time passing from an unidentified “I” to and un-named “you”. Photographic essay on the Buffer Zone, Caesura, part of an ongoing series of images by Jim Harold that document the landscape along and within the demarcation lines of the UN-brokered Buffer Zone (established 45 years ago). These photographs are intentionally understated images that touch upon the zone’s state of disruption and dislocation (physical, social political, and cultural) and that of a returning, if misshapen, appearance of idyll within the uninhabited landscape. Exploring the role of the 'self' and the 'other': Part 1, by Ana Souto, questions the role of the 'other' and the 'self', the outsider educator negotiating postcolonial tensions around agency and access with local students, open to interpretative quotes from established authors, reflections through texts and images. Exploring the role of the 'self' and the 'other': Part 2, by Susan Brind and Jim Harold, reflects on the use of Travelling Colloquia and Nomadic Dialogues as methods to enable meaningful exchanges with people with local knowledge. This is exemplified by the CCFT Nicosia Colloquium, 2016; Timeless Encounters: 'Place of Barley', Agios Sozomenos, 2018; and the Buffer Fringe 2019, Nicosia, in addition to conversations in the space of the City. Three other sections reflect a multiplicity of observations, facts and voices that, collaged together, reflect the complexity of place, and the processes and methods used to explore these ideas.The main methodology of this submission is practice-led and phenomenological in nature, moving from visual, textual, and reflexive ethnography to autoethnographic scenarios, explored and analysed through dialogue and exchange. This collaboration between the authors sits under the umbrella of the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT), an international research centre which interrogates how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute to and share critical insights about place making, belonging and occupation. The core participants in CCFT are a group of artistic researchers, architects, designers and cultural theorists from England, Scotland, Norway and Cyprus whose practices, individual and collectively, seek to consider the role of artistic research in shaping narratives of place. Attention has been given to the diversity of each creative and academic practice to allow for the expression of difference as a dynamic aspect of interaction. CCFT’s working methods build on an established mutual respect; track record and insight, rooted in a continued collaborative relationship that has emerged through trust and dialogue. The collaboration focuses on practice-based research methods, exploiting the creative intersection between image and text, presented as performance, publication, installation, architectural and design interventions, and spatial practices. CCFT’s key methods are the use of Travelling Colloquia and Nomadic Dialogues as strategies to explore the meaning(s) of ‘place’ from different locations, perspectives, and across time. This exposition, focusing on Cyprus as a case study, offers a multidisciplinary collage of contrasting voices which does not aim to resolve the question of liminality, but add liminal voices and spaces to the debate. Note: The descriptive text about CCFT, its membership, focus and approach is extracted from the group's aims and objectives and is part of an introductory text in a forthcoming publication Fluid Territories, University of Bergen, 2020.

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

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

Benjamin, Andrew. Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism, London: Routledge, 1997.

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

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

Bonnefoy, Yves. The Arrière-pays, Stephen Romer (trans.), London: Seagull Books, 2012 [1972].

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

Brittain, David. Split Focus, catalogue essay, Jim Harold, Across a Fractured land(scape), Glasgow: Street Level Gallery, 2005.

De Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven F Rendall (trans.), Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984 (1988).

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

Deleuze, Gilles. ‘The Fissure of Anaxagoras and the Local Fire of Heraclitus’ in Desert Islands and other Texts 1953-1974, Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective", Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575-599, 1988.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1962].

Hitchens, Christopher. Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, London: Verso, 1977.

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

Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Scapeland’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Mandeville, Sir John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, C. Moseley (Intro), London: Penguin, Edition 2005.

Manem, Max Van. “Phenomenology of Practice”, Phenomenology of Practice, 1 (1) 11-30, 2007.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.

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.

Papadakis, Yiannis. Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. Spatial Aesthetics: Art, place and the everyday, London: Rivers Oram Press, 2006.

Rendell, Jane. Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Selected Poems and Letters, Jeremy Harding & John Sturrock (eds/trans), London: Penguin, 2004.

Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Segalen, Victor. Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity (Post-Contemporary Interventions), 1918, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Sharr, Adam. Heidegger for Architects, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2007.

Stavrides, Stavros. ‘Open Space Appropriations and the Potentialities of a “City of Thresholds”’, in Mariani, Manuela & Patrick Barron (eds.), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, London: Routledge, 2014.

Stephanides, Stephanos & Stavros Karayanni. Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imaginations, Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Tsiouti, Andri. Ayios Sozomenos: Landscape as a Palimpsest, National Technical University of Athens, 2014.

Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York: Semiotext, 1991.

Bibliography

and Further Reading

Avdelopoulos and Coutas, Ch. and A. Cyprus, Dies Irae, Nicosia: C’Edition, 1976.

Barkan, Elazar and Karen Barkey. Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics & Conflict Resolution, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Bannerman, David A. & W. Mary. Birds of Cyprus, Lefkosa: K. Rustem & Brother, 1989 [1958].

Broome, Benjamin J. Building Bridges Across the Green Line, Nicosia: United Nations Development Programme, 2005.

Chapman, Olive Murray. Across Cyprus, London: The Bodley Head, 1945.

Dodd, Clement. Disaccord on Cyprus: The UN Plan and After, Cambridge: The Eothen Press, 2003.

Dodd, Clement. Update on the Cyprus Conflict, The Turkish Area Study Group, Cambridge: The Eothen Press, 2006.

Durrell, Lawrence. Bitter Lemons, London: Faber & Faber, 1958.

Gazioglu, Ahmet. The Turks in Cyprus, A Province of the Ottoman Empire (1571-1878),London: K. Rustem and Brother, 1990.

Gibbons, Harry Scott. The Genocide Files, Lefkosha: Near East Publishing, 2003.

Hannay, David. Cyprus: The Search for a Solution, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Harbottle, Michael. The Impartial Soldier, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Lobby for Cyprus Study Group. Cyprus: Origins of the Present Crisis – 1950’s to 1970’s, London: Lobby for Cyprus, 2000.

O'Malley, Brendan and Craig, Ian. The Cyprus Conspiracy, America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999.

Panteli, Stavros. A History of Cyprus: From Foreign Domination to Troubled Independence, London: East-West Publications, 2000.

Thubron, Colin. Journey into Cyprus, London: Heinemann, 1975.

Shirley, Rodney. Kitchener’s Survey of Cyprus 1878-1883, Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 2001.

Uzer, Ûgur and Cengiz, Mehmet. The Cyprus Matter, Çiçek Emed (trans), Turkey: Ankara Bar Publications, 2002.

Welz, Gisela. European Products: Making and Unmasking Heritage in Cyprus, Berghahn Books, 2015.

Pamphlets/Leaflets

Lobby for Cyprus Study Group. Cyprus: Origins of the Present Crisis – 1950s to 1970s, London: Lobby for Cyprus, 2000.

Nicosia Master Plan. Survey of the Buildings along the Buffer Zone in Nicosia, Nicosia: Bi-Communal Development Programme, n.d.

Dissertations

Enotiades, Phaedon. Mending The Wounds: Architecture and the Divided City, M.Arch. Thesis, The University of Texas at Arlington, 1991.

Defteroes, Greg. Tracing a Green Line Through Time: Events on the Cyprus Landscape, 1958-2002, MA Thesis, Dept. of Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University, 2002.

PhD Thesis

Pieri, C. Selective heritage management in divided cities: focusing on Nicosia's walled city centre. PhD, Nottingham Trent University, 2017.

Tip

Tip