Paper presented at:
Learning with Mountains: Recalibrating how we understand art and planet
Conference in Cyprus (Nicosia and Kapedes), 6-8 February 2025

ABSTRACT

For a period of 4 years, pre-Covid, Susan Brind & Jim Harold developed projects in Agios Sozomenos, Potamia (Republic of Cyprus) and Tymvou / Kirklar (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), considering the complex histories evident in the landscape. Linking those places, they traced the route of the Gialias river, following its dry bed into and across the Mesaoria plain. It proved a richly layered environment in which to think beyond its recent past to an ancient time: to think about the landscape as archive; and how readings of such landscapes sit within a geological timespan that is beyond our full comprehension, with an ecology possibly ambivalent to our presence.

Consequently Brind & Harold have become interested in questioning how art can be utilised to draw attention to a rhizomatic, interconnected plane of being. Methods include uncovering knowledge through books, maps and archives but, most importantly, fieldwork to experience locations first hand in order to develop a relation with site and place through what is observed and what is experienced. In combination they have come to understand place not as a fixed edifice but in a state of flux or becoming: an emerging palimpsest of readings, experiences, events and timescales. Using the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories’ strategy of ‘Nomadic Dialogues’ (in contexts such as this) as a method and an outcome; as an artistic means to be creatively proactive in the articulation of new narratives for place making, place meaning and belonging.

This paper includes a performative reading and makes reference to two site-specific works created in response to the areas of Agios Sozomenos, Potamia, Tymvou and the Gialias River. It centres on humans’ entangled relationship with nature in shaping those places in the past and in the present. Re-focusing in this way, the works explore different layers of time in order to read the places and landscapes in an ecological, political and phenomenological way, so that the narrative held within the landscape is neither linear nor reductive, but is itself entangled (Timothy Morton) and we, too, are entangled within it (Karen Bard). Not separate from but part of that nature, that history, those landscapes, those places.

I/we have been making work in response to the geographical and political landscape in Cyprus over a period of 8 years, specialising in presenting works in sites and contexts where dialogue is built into the format of presentation and, particularly in the last three forms of presentation, working in tandem with the Cyprus Buffer Fringe and the Home for Cooperation (an NGO focused on initiating and supporting intercommunal dialogue between the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus and South Cyprus (occupied by Greek Cypriots).

See:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1304585/1304586.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/976547/976548

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/380422/554641

Our contribution to fostering intercommunal connection through these projects undertaken under the auspices of CCFT was identified, by the Director of the Cyprus Buffer Fringe festival 2020 and 2021, as being original and impactful in the way that our practice-led research, site responsive works, and related events facilitated informed, non-hierarchical, discourse between individuals and communities in a politically complex cultural landscape.

The original research project that this conference presentation builds directly upon can be found in two locations on GSA Radar:
‘Tiimeless Encounters – ‘Place of Barley’, 2018 https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/cgi/users/home?screen=EPrint%3A%3AView&eprintid=6596
And
'Besides the Yialias River', 2019
https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/cgi/users/home?screen=EPrint%3A%3AView&eprintid=7387
Two works were presented for ‘Tiimeless Encounters – ‘Place of Barley’, with accompanying events created to nurture intercommunal relations, spread across two villages:
- 'Woodlands, Charcoal and Copper', Agios Sozomenos, 2018 (Site specific sculptural installation).
- 'One River – Two Walks: Potamia-Kirklar', Potamia, 2018 (site specific text installation and performed reading).
In this project, working alongside Greek and Turkish Cypriot artists, architects, activists and academics, we engaged in a series of creative interventions and events within the abandoned village of Agios Sozomenos / Arpalik, and the inhabited village of Potamia which are just a few miles apart. For a taster of these events see:
https://urbangorillas.org/urban-interventions/ayios-sozomenos-place-of-barley-_-timeless-encounters/#:~:text=The%20CCFT%2D%20Creative%20Center%20of,presentations%20and%20exhibitions%20within%20Agios

Both villages lie within South Cyprus. Potamia is now occupied by Cypriot Greeks, but prior to its devastation and abandonment in 1964 uprisings, Agios Sozomenos / Arpalik was occupied intercommunally. Between these two villages runs the Gialias River or, at least the dry riverbed which travels from a mountain range in the South Cyprus (i.e. occupied by Cypriot Greeks), through the UN brokered demilitarized Buffer Zone to Tymvou/Kirklar (a few miles north of Agios Sozomenos into what is the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus) and then on to the sea at Famagusta, on the eastern border between the North and South.

'Besides the Yialias River' was also developed from this same body of research and was presented at Cyprus Buffer Fringe in 2019 as part of a CCFT project called ‘Urban Glenti’, situated inside the UN Buffer Zone, occupying UN tents, beside the Home for Cooperation, specifically programmed to foster intercommunal dialogue.

Our research for all these works covered both the recent social and political significance of the area as well as the depth of history of the region. Hundreds of years ago, the whole area around Agios Sozomenos / Arpalik and Tymvou/Kirklar – the Mesaoria / Mesarya plain – was a landscape of open woodland associated with the production of copper and, in a deeper time-period, the Mesaoria /Mesarya plain once lay under the sea. So, the nature of the landscape has evolved and changed over millenia, and still is doing so despite human occupation, or abandonment.

The approach to reading the landscape in relation to different historical time periods arises not only through our site-responsive practice in relation to place (with CCFT) but also through involvement in the INCAScot (International Network for Contemporary Archaeology Scotland), focused on art/archaeology collaborations, and our discussions of the importance of examining archaeology within the contemporary world to shape how we think about the future, ecologically and sustainably.

Funders for these initial projects:
Timeless Encounters (secured collectively by CCFT):
British High Commission, Embajada de Espana en Nicosia, The Erasmus Programme, EU, Glasgow School of Art, RDF Fund, Institute Cervantes, Nicosia, Nottingham Trent University, UK, Potamia Village, Cyprus, University of Bergen, Norway, University of Nicosia, Urban Gorillas, Nicosia.
'Besides the Yialias River' / Urban Glenti was enabled through funding from Cyprus Buffer Fringe, and in-kind support from the UN in Cyprus and University of Nicosia.
INCAScot network was funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and we were named researchers in the application.

• https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1...
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• https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3...