RECLAIMED LINES
Cyprus as an island was defined by foreign interests for centuries. The Frankish, the Ottomans and the British Empire left impositions of control and meaning over space as well as over its inhabitants, their behaviour and ideologies, sometimes amplifying and often estranging cultural diversity into ethnical opposition between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks. The continuing focus on ethnical divide led to conflict between the parties. After escalating violence in Nicosia, British General Peter Young drew a dividing line through the Capital city in an emergency meeting including officials from both ethnicities. This line retraces what used to be the market street, the main meeting point of all Cypriots, and turned it into the division line of the country which lasts until now.
I question the adequacy of a traditional, hand drawn line as a description of a border. The reading of the hand drawn line as a mere visualization of two adjacent (political) bodies hides its autonomy, given that it is a physical body in itself. Contrary to its reading as a division, every drawn line highlights the relief of the surface it is drawn over and is therefore highly sensitive to it. The line is misused as a border tool. The Green Line, which, outside of Nicosia, is defined by the opposing front lines of Turkish and Greek soldiers following Turkeys invasion in 1974, is defined by topography and political interests, but both from an imprecise top down view.
Cyprus contains multiple layers of character. The most prevalent layer, namely the political identity conflict, does not exist inside of the Buffer Zone, as both nations end beyond its fringes. This enables the reinterpretation and emphasis of some kind of character, which describes the island of Cyprus when human conflicts are disregarded. This character has remained largely hidden, but was also influenced by the social and political history.
How can this lost character be read, and how can it be interpreted into a new and unpolitical, therefore non-divisive character for the Cypriot people?
I propose a pilgrimage path, leading the romantics who are interested in the rediscovery of the island through its last space untouched by politics. They can walk in the zone, or they can live in it. There are no political or national definitions that exist in this place. It is apolitical. What one is left with, when politics have left the place, is the Materiality of the place itself, its landscape, which contains imprints of past human interventions such as mines or fields as well as untouched nature. The events, which left their mark on the Buffer Zone in a chronological order, can be seen now simultaneously. They lose their linear hierarchy like in a palimpsest.
In a process opposite to Freud‘s Secondary Revision of Dreams, I read the landscape new, emphasising moments that stand out and leaving behind their historical meaning and chronological order. I reclaim the tool of the top-down guided definition of the place which is the drawn line (previously used for border demarcations) by focussing on its quality, namely a highlighting of the areas it is drawn over. The highlighted events are placed within the zone or on its fringes, standing witness to both its content and its conditions of existence. I describe these moments using words that I associate them with. They create an amalgamation of connotations, which derive from a mixture of memories from my experiences in Cyprus, as well as memories from seemingly unrelated experiences. I interpret them as drawings, which are archetypical sketches, a medium dependant on the line as a tool. They are neither plans, nor elevations or perspectives, but rather all the above. In a combination of the highlighted moment, the attributed words, and the sketches, I create architectural sketches, now more concrete. These interventions are born from their immediate context. They aim to draw the pilgrims’ attention to the place they stand in, while being an interpretation of the space themselves. Finally, the sketches are translated into three-dimensional objects.
The Buffer Zone has the function of a physical barrier, but disregards other interrelations which were disrupted by the political segregation running horizontally through threm. The above seen scroll contains three lines; my personal line following natural borders (terrain, topography) having the thickness of a pencil line, if it was drawn on a map of 1:500 (1m), a line describing the sound that I experience as I try to physically reach the political border as it is drawn up on the map and crosses almost inaccessible terrain, and a hidden line, mapping the invisibility of the Green Line itself.
As no Fences or Walls enforce it, it can be traced only through its consequences: Regrowth of nature, demographic distribution, errors in natural and infrastructural systems that cross the border, etc. Following the increase of the Greek/Turkish dichotomy, the Green Line was the final solidification of the conflict. After a major segregation through mass migrations and ethnic cleansing, it has been widely tolerated, even though not accepted, for the last 50 years.
The border dissolved its own function of a physical threshold, as the majority of people have no interest in entering it anymore. An indicator for this is the constantly growing demilitarization of the zone. We are left with a territory defined by the borders which were thought up by ideology and which follow topography and directions towards settlements of political interest. This territory, which is the manifestation of the ethnical conflict of the country, is at the same time the only place, in which this conflict is not present anymore.
