Blue Notes / Green Line, Nicosia. 2018
“Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” Francis Alys, 1975
Ledra Palace crossing of the Green Line was opened in 2003, at the same site of the Ledra Palace Hotel, which was allegedly the most luxurious hotel in Nicosia. The hotel is now the UN headquarters and home to the members of the peacekeeping forces, it overlooks the crossing point on the western side of the Green Line (also known as the buffer zone) which extends across the Island. This crossing point is where diplomatic cars can pass, it is much more open than the inner city crossing point of Ledra Street.
Opposite the Palace, within the space of the Green Line, is the ‘Home for Cooperation,’ today it is a meeting place that “aims to act as a bridge-builder between the separated communities, memories and visions. It provides working spaces and opportunities for Non-Governmental Organizations and individuals to design and implement innovative projects”.
These cyanotypes are photograms - cameraless prints that were made in the sun, direct traces of objects found there. They were exposed, washed and placed to dry at the back of the ‘Home for Cooperation’. Photographic prints produced in a place where the use of a camera was prohibited. Here I made 47 cyanotypes, each unique trace of this extraordinary contested place, known as the ‘dead zone’ sometimes ‘no man’s land.’
Lying between the north and south of Cyprus, this crossing was at a wide point of the green line, overlooked by tall watchtowers; on one side the UN peacekeeping force, on the other the ‘Home for Cooperation’, a safe place. Based out of sight at the back of the building, keeping a low profile, I began making cyanotypes of plants and objects I found within the Green Line; an uncultivated quiet space. I found weeds, mostly of the prickly variety and several objects including; a comb, a child’s spoon and a piece of string. The Green Line took its name from a ceasefire line drawn on a map with a green chinagraph pencil, now it has become an actual green line of vegetation that grows in the neglected, uninhabited void.
In the gallery, these Prussian blue cyanotypes were installed to replicate the path of the Green Line, a political line in cartographic form, becoming a new blue line along the path of the Pedieos River that once flowed through the old city. Not unlike the blue lines we drew as children to signify a river.
When making these photographs I was working on a flat surface, the ground, there was no ‘right way up’ there is no horizon line no dividing line but a space for imagination and dialogue.
Installation photographs from the exhibition ‘Layers of Visibility’ reveal other works made in Nicosia and the wider environment of Cyprus, ‘Shadow drawings’, Olive Trees, an earlier project also highlighted on the website, map works, objectographs of Eucalyptus leaves and several series of black & white photographs of Venetian Bridges and of olive trees.
‘Layers of Visibility’ was an exhibition curated by Liz Wells and Yiannis Toumazis representing a collaboration between NiMAC/University of Plymouth, residencies were undertaken between 2013 - 2017 by five different artists /lecturers.
