Coming Together

Day 1

Curator’s Cut (Gülgün): 

Our first day exploring the White Nights residency. The main task for the day involved orienting ourselves to each other and the city of Famagusta. Beginning with the theme of the residency, I kicked off the day with a presentation on the idea of what a White Nights festival actually is or can be. I talked about Northern Spark in Minneapolis, which is modeled on a white nights concept and is a free, annual multidisciplinary, multi-venue dusk to dawn participatory arts festival. My work with Northern Spark festival involves commissioning an annual signature artwork and the artists that present in The Commons, a park in the center of the city of Minneapolis.

My presentation also addressed the constraints that the Famagusta residency has placed on the artists: they will have to create work in the form of large scale public projections. I shared examples of participatory projections in the Northern Spark festival as well as projection work by prominent artists such as Shimon Attie and Tony Ousler. I also made some effort to match this work with the subject matter interests of the resident artists. 

Next I led a short workshop on sited research strategies. This methodology calls for artists to choose a single sense or sensibility through which to explore the city. Each artist had to choose one research action from the following list:  sight, sound, movement, signs and signage (formal and informal) and narrative. I asked them  to engage and explore the local area using only one approach. Here are a few examples of what was collected.

City exploration movement experiment by Aliki Kiritsi

(research on city signs and graffiti by Add Atassi)

"Signs speak a language but not the one you think you know"

Italio Calvino, Invisible Cities

The rest of the day was devoted to orienting ourselves to the city. Serdar Atay came to talk about the work of the Famagusta Walled City Association and its projects and archive. The artists can choose to use the archive as a resource and as well as their space during the residency.

Aydin Mehmet Ali, a Turkish Cypriot writer, activist and translator met us on the Palm Hotel beach which is adjacent to the abandoned haunted and militarized neighborhood of Varosha /Marash [ a little about the area] She read from her work on the beach,  then led us on a meandering walk through the old city ruins, docks, monuments and spaces. We discussed the city’s spaces, its history, organization and character. The elegance of the ancient Famagusta skyline was impressive, “there are no buildings higher than the palm trees, wow! ’ exclaimed a Greek Cypriot artist. 

We watched the sun set from the walls of the Othello Tower.

The day ended with an unworkshop presentation by cultural theorist Crystalleni Loizidou who hosted an un-workshop on how to begin to investigate place? Some of her live notes from this discussion below:

Speaking of Famagusta / dimensions of being in Famagusta

- A sense of never 'knowing enough’

- Notions of Cypriot resilience (and the underbelly of such narratives)

- Emphasis on stories of connectivity, wealth, and trade (syllabary, diving into jewels, transport of animals, relation to Silk Road / offshoot)

- Pikadilli and its surrounding area as representative of..