Among the selling of the passports_’Cyprus Files by Aljazira’ - generating mobility, the opening of the path towards the golden coastline of Ghost city of Famagusta, the new measurements for COVID that generate pauses and inaccessibility, the resignations of politicians and the president of the parliament with the relevant turmoil and ‘chaotic- uncontrolled movements’, there are new paths, new ways of moving, new hopes for people and other beings to lead their paths. (Photo by Nafsika Hadjichristou, in Akamas, Cyprus)

18th October 2020: From the Barras to the Necropolis, East Glasgow

Alex Menzies

Musician and Sound Artist

I went to Orga seven months ago.

Just before the lockdown came.

My grandfather was roaming these places when young – couldn’t keep himself at one place for long, to be honest.

His Morris Minor was again crossing the roads next to the beach.                     

Oh my here it was again: this constant crackling sound whenever  the car was moving.

Horizontal mobilities are impossible, once again.

Verticality is what we are only left with.

Despo Pasia, museologist- museum educator< UCL Institute of Education

Orga.North-West coast of Cyprus.

Old ways, new ways, other ways - reminisces and stories of the past and presence coexisting with abundances of antithesis

Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls

(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge

a landscape to be invented

to the South, reflective memory

to the East, the mirror

to the West, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply.

Octavio Paz

I look forward to our journeys together, through topographies, sometimes on bicycles and always archaeological in their intentions.

Alex Hale, November 2020

TOPO-CYCLICAL-OGRAPHIES

Archaeology is a creative practice and the contemporary archaeologist can pursue disruptive paths, which flout traditions. We all have our own personal archaeologies which enable us to consider temporal and spatial stories, that document and archive past actions, to explore and gauge our presence and envisage multiple futures. One of my archaeologies involves contemplative journeys through topographies known and unknown. 

In response to ‘movement’, I would like to explore the deliberative act of cycling through palimpsests of time and landscape with a view to unearthing the proximate and underlines. I want to surface the lines of territorial exploration that millions of people are making with bicycles; lines they have inscribed before, often re-inscribe repeatedly and lines that will be made in multiple tomorrows. When David Byrne talks about riding around a city he says ‘there’s an exhilaration… a nicely paced perspective…a sense of floating through the landscape’. I love riding through the week and into the weekends. Riding excites me and feeds an endless appetite of observation and movement, and quenches a physical exertion with a balm that stills the mind.

My journeys are not mapped, yet they can be found on maps. 

Could the reflections of the ‘mobilities’ lead to the ‘other livings’, to our ‘other’?

Journeys take me to places I will never revisit, yet I return.

My journeys are taken alone and I am never lonely.

My journeys sustain me, but I am exhausted by them.

I take journeys that are felt and forgotten.