This photo of my mum, dad and I was taken in Spring of 1972, in my grand-parent’s house in Draperstown, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. I was 5/6mts old. We had recently moved from Derry city, where my parents had lived and worked as nurses in the Altnagelvin Hospital.
Bloody Sunday happened a few months before this photo was taken, on Sunday 30th January 1972, when 13 people were killed and 15 people wounded after members of the British Army opened fire on a civil rights demonstration. It is remembered as one of the most significant events of the Northern Irish troubles and has loomed large in my consciousness throughout my life.
This is the only picture I’ve ever seen of my mum wearing pigtails.
I enjoy a lot the notion of a dysfunctional family, us the CCFT members, coined by Duncan! Discomforts, dysfunctions all the dis, dys, dis … that make us living together and keep us going …
My daughter Nafsika, watching us presenting the Research Catalogue, said ‘wow this is like a scrapbook’. She keeps them for ages. Her luggage was stolen last year. Some of the material of her scrapbook was lost forever. She found it challenging to proceed with richer scrapbooks and teach her friends to come out with their scrapbooks.
Is there any ending? Or is it just the emergence of an abundance of beginnings?
Veiling Famagusta_Veiling the Research Catalogue.
Do you remember the 1972 page being veiled a while ago, 2:48 pm 6th of December 2020 (me in the only photo outdoors I have from Famagusta) and sometime in October of 1972 They were both veiled …
Was the veiling matter that brought us together?
Are there any meanings in what we are doing, who I am, who we are? Are we just a BECOMING?
Fluid Territories _ There was no other option. Just to follow the flow, the flows … (is there any other option?)
Flows: My son Alkinoos (just returned from his 1st year of studies in Biology) told me that 100 trillion of Neutrinos (subatomic particles) pass through my body per second. Is there any other choice but to live with this fact, this information?
Territories: He also taught me that there are 10 times more microbial cells than human cells in my body. Who Am I? A human, a territory of symbiosis?
I was born in a social housing neighbourhood. The only one in my city. Its stories and stigma indelibly flew in my being.
I was born in the ghost city in Famagusta. Twelve years of my life are blurred behind its veil - waiting to be unearthed?
The stories (my stories?) kept running faster and faster - living as a refugee from city to city, facing losses, meeting the ‘other’ in extreme countries as USSR and Japan_ I just kept following the Flows.
I live in a house_ a neighborhood_ a city_a country that is all divided, but… still rich with flows and blurred boundaries. I live among the fluid territories of my family, my work as an architect, academic, and activist (am I?).
Following the flows, I found myself as a member of the synergy of the Creative Center of Fluid Territories. Not sure how, not sure why… Just drifted by the flow (thanks Ana Souto…!). A flow that led me back to Famagusta, to revisit the porosities of our borders together with the CCFT-ers …
Following the Neutrino flows and the symbiosis of the microbial and human cells… it feels as if ‘some’ of Duncan, Shauna, Jim Sue, Linda, and Johan flew into my being? Some of the contributors and participants of our activities pointed out the dynamic exchanges, the multiplicities, the role of this expansive collaborative space of the Fluid Territories …
I am possessed by ideas and understandings that I am not sure any more if they were mine, if they are mine, or part of this fluid collaboration.
It feels that I, we are flowing into the myriads of layers and depths of:
Porosities and porous borders, blurring zones, multiple identities, In between conditions, unearthed entities, hidden ingredients, unnoticed significances, ephemeral and spontaneous urbanisms, vague terrains, immaterial matters, malleable courtyards, human topographies, nature taking over, evanescent traces, architecture as a system of flows, spaces as events, landscapes of human rituals, building as a verb, weather, architecture, celebrating the differences, crafting of humanitarian constructed fragments, making significant the everyday, interwoven weather and social ritual scenographies, emerging of identities, producing processes that reproduce us, flux relationships,
Flows on Territories and Territories on Flows …
that accompany me, accompany you, that they flow from each other and …
Construct us: the member of the Fluid Territories.
Famagusta is being layered with a veil for 46 years. Pain is not the only experience! Looking behind the veil to find who we were then, we find ourselves now.
Looking behind the veil of the research catalogue may we find ourselves tomorrow?
Let’s keep our glances positively and creatively on tomorrow …
YH
I was not born in 1972. My father became a Professor in Law at the University of Santiago de Compostela, 1972.
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Casualty”, which was written in 1972, in response to Bloody Sunday and the escalating violence taking place in N. Ireland, speaks about a Lough Neagh, pub loving, eel fisherman who becomes a casualty of the sectarian warfare.
Cranfield’s Holy well, (where the two small amber crystals, pictured on the main page came from), is located in the town land of Cranfield, on the edge of Lough Neagh and is home to a community of eel fishermen.
https://soundcloud.com/92y/seamus-heaney-reads-from-opened-ground-selected-poems-and-other-work
Seamus Heaney read’s ‘Casualty’ (16:29mins – 20:47mins)
I'd forgotten that I was one of four identical brothers back then in Cornwall - I'm not sure where the other three are now.
Hanging out somewhere I guess ...
The fauna of the here represents an extremely depleted and reduced variant of the continental northern boreal one. The level of its depletion roughly corresponds to the latitudinal shift by one or two biomes, that is, by the number of species it is comparable to the mainland concrete faunas of the forested or hypoarctic tundra. Only very few arctic species, let alone more southern (nemoral) faunal elements, occur on the archipelago. The compositions of the basic fauna groups and their dominant species are determined there by three main factors: a wide distribution of intrazonal ecosystems (coastal wastelands and grasslands, birch sparse forests, peat bogs), limited living space, and extreme climatic conditions. Among the dominants are eurytopic polyzonal and, to a lesser degree, hypoarctic species. The isolation of the here is no significant barrier to the dispersal of numerous animal species, but these islands form a highly specific environment that strongly prevents the invasion of new species lacking relevant preadaptations to the local habitat and climatic conditions. The effect of “density compensation” of lower taxonomic diversity is revealed on the archipelago in many taxa, the range of abundant species being able to vary considerably in time depending on the climatic conditions. The here's fauna is continental by origin, having been mainly formed in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene (∼9–10 ka before the present).
1.
“A Report of the here Branch of the Arkhangelsk Local History Society for 1924–1926,” in Proceedings of the Solovki Local History Society, Issue 3 (USLON, Solovki, 1972), pp. 1–106 [in Russian].
