Notes on "Investigating Place", by Chrystalleni Loizidou

Curated by Ellada

Chrystalleni visited the residency and stayed with us for a couple of days over the Oct 6-7 weekend, participating in activities and discussions. She registered her thoughts on GoogleDoc, which she continued feeding after she left Famagusta.

What you see here was extracted on Thursday, Oct. 11th, around noon.

How do we begin to investigate place?

Introducing the question

This is a live document, with the mission of addressing, in text, the particularities of experiencing

and responding to 'place’. It puts words to the need for a methodological deconstruction,

or a creative transcendence of experiential biases that seem inherent in the residency format.

It invites, as a starting place, a critical consideration of the (Foucauldian) govermentalities,

or structured limitations on behaviour, performance, creativity and experience, and the

possibilities of response that we impose on this parachute mode of 'being’.  The need to address

this (always already here) question or 'position of intellectual uncertainty’ is beautifully predicated

in (Im)permanence and lives at the heart of this week-long invitation.

Methodology

Notes from “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It” Carlo Ginzburg;
John Tedeschi; Anne C. Tedeschi in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Autumn, 1993), pp. 10-35.

In one of the earliest uses of the term, scholar Luis Gonzalez, inserted the word microhistory into the subtitle of a monograph. The book investigates, within the span of four centuries, the transformations experienced by a tiny, "forgotten" village. But the minute dimensions are redeemed by its representative characteristics. Besides the fact that Gonzalez was born and lived there, this is the element that justifies the choice of San Jose de Gracia over a thousand other villages just like it. Here microhistory is synonymous with local history, written, as Gonzalez stressed citing Paul Leuilliot, from a qualitative rather than a quantitative perpective. The success enjoyed by Pueblo en vilo (re-printed and translated into French) persuaded its author to theorize about its methodology. Gonzalez distinguished microhistory from the anecdotal and discredited petite histoire; and he reiterated its identity with what in England, France, and the United States is called local history, and which Nietzsche had defined as "antiquarian or archeological history."

Finally, to counteract the objections aroused by the word microhistory, he suggested two alternatives: matria history, suitable for evoking that small, weak, feminine, sentimental world of the mother which revolves around the family and the village; or yin history, the Taoist term that recalls all that is "feminine, conservative, terrestrial, sweet, obscure and painful."

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....

Microhistory as identifying a Butterfly effect.

Other notes

- Why don't we start each from our latest, most urgent concerns? / Why don't we share with each
other the most advanced articulation of our concerns?

- (Aside from the difference between object and process oriented public art) Don't we
also have to be careful when we say that “the state doesn't exist” in Cyprus / that the state
is a communitarian regime?

- on Nurtane’s answer to artists parachuting / overwriting, overlapping experiences,
the situationist flaneur+cat food: Nurtane's tips and tricks: neighbourhood politics

- on Aycan’s response to not belonging: public art intervention & being backed out