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.

'... moving through emptied areas and fractured lands'

Photography as practice-led research

The series of photographs by Jim Harold seen in this exposition result from fieldwork undertaken between 1998–2005, with permission from the UN, in Cyprus’ de-militarised Buffer Zone.[1] The series has subsequently been expanded through further fieldwork since 2016.

The photographs address memory and the landscape of conflict and seek to engage with the dilemma of aesthetics and politics. The images intentionally resist literal and figurative interpretations and deliberately frame every element within their content as having no more or less significance. So, within the now re-wilded landscape, everything seems ‘natural’ or matter of fact, including bullet-pocked walls, wire fences marking a mine field, territorial flags, and domestic remnants. By paring back the emotional rhetoric of each photograph – presenting an unembellished image – each depiction presents a kind of document that acknowledges the detached and ruptured world captured within the Buffer Zone: neither a theatrical space, nor an incontrovertible truth, but something that acknowledges both the construct of the Zone and the unknowability behind its appearance.

In a very real sense these images of Cyprus are the material trace of the act of an archaeological enquiry into the present. A present represented by successive visits to the Island and to many of the sites depicted. As such each image acknowledges that the present is very much attached to events occurring 40 years ago and earlier; whether that of the Turkish invasion or the earlier relics of Ottoman and British Colonial rule. Events are present across the surface of each image, as both an actual trace – of objects or affects – and as the consequence of former histories.

The photographs do not, however, allude solely to the past. They evidence the currency of change due to human action, neglect, time and climate. These images also document an evolving archive of things turned away from, lost or left: a random and pervasive collection of cultural detritus.[2] Each photograph is, then, not simply a post-event nostalgic object, as some theorists might suggest. Rather, it is a melancholy thing – occupying the territory between reportage and the gallery – that, through its aesthetic qualities, denies narrative closure.

The photographs, now curious relics, ally themselves to time, the nature of events, and the cut in time represented by the Buffer Zone itself. A caesura that is also a hemi-stitch between the edges and margins of each nation state. Within this space we are located in Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘present’ that is filled with a profound sense, simultaneously, of uncertainty and of becoming[3]. In these terms, this landscape cannot be reduced simply to a conventional sense of ‘place’ as a fixed entity[4] – which would imply a state of belonging or of loss (with the attendant thoughts of nostalgia). Instead, the viewer is held in a state of uncertainty where, to quote Jean-François Lyotard, they: “[…] are no longer simply its hostage but its lost traveller.”[5] Interpreted in this way, both the border and the image cease to be limits or fixed points but become permeable spaces where meaning becomes dynamically other.

[1] Photographs from this series have been exhibited and published, as follows:

1998 Desert: Between the lines, at the limits: Portfolio Gallery, Edinburgh. Comprising new work made in the Cyprus Buffer Zone and the Egyptian Desert. Funded by The Leverhulme Trust and SoFA Research Committee.

2005 Across a Fractured Land(scape), installation using wall painting texts and photographs, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

2006 Caesura - Cyprus/Kibris/Kypros,an E-publication commissioned by Proboscis, London for their series entitled Liquid Geographies. A5, 28pp. ISBN 1 901540 36 7.

2016 ‘Caesura: Cyprus – Kibris – Kypros’, in “The Drouth”, Issue 54 – Interstices, Winter/Spring 2016. ISSN 1474 6190.

2016 CCFT exhibition and Symposium, Department of Architecture, University of Nicosia.

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

[3] Bonnefoy, Yves. The Arrière-pays, Stephen Romer (trans.), London: Seagull Books, 2012 (1972), 170.

[4] Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Scapeland’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 216.

[5] Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Scapeland’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 219.