This output builds on a body of research undertaken in association with the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT), an international, inter-disciplinary research group comprising artists, designers, architects and theorists from academic institutions in the UK, Norway and Cyprus interrogating how interdisciplinary research practices contribute to and share critical insights about place making, belonging and occupation. The CCFT 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 – notably including travelling colloquia and nomadic dialogues – which individually and collectively, seek to consider the role of artistic research in shaping narratives of place.
See also outputs: 7386, 7168, 7133, 6596, 6551, 6549, 4562.
The research that informed the development of 'Besides the Yialias River' was undertaken in preparation for 'Ayios Sozomenos: Timeless Encounters – Place of Barley', 2018, but only in 2019 became realised in the form of this propositional work. Our research in Ayios Sozomenos covered both the recent social and political significance of the place as a former inter-communal village, and the depth of history of the site. Hundreds of years ago, the whole area around Ayios Sozomenos and Kirklar – the Mesaoria (Mesarya) plain – was a landscape of open woodland associated with the production of copper. These two places were later sites for spiritual retreat: respectively, a hermitage for Sozomenos of Potamia, an early Christian saint, and A Sufi Tekke. So deep is its history, it is said that the blood of Adonis – killed whilst hunting in the forest – lies on the land of Cyprus and that the Mesaoria (Mesarya) plain once lay under the sea.