Françoise Parfait

Suspended Spaces: an Experiment in Off-centering

Experience, like breathing, is a series of inhalations and exhalations;

they are regularly paced and turn into a rhythm because of the existence of intervals,

periods during which one phase ceases and the next, inchoate, one, is being prepared.1

John Dewey

Famagusta, name of an emotion

The Suspended Spaces project can be recounted the way you recount a story, a true story, and a story that can be imagined as it gradually unfolds. This story starts thus: Once upon a time, on 21 March 2007, on a spring day, three friends, all artists and researchers connected by their work place in France, found themselves looking at a huge abandoned coastal resort on an island in the eastern Mediterranean. There was nothing haphazard about them being there, because, before they went there, a friend of theirs, the artist Marcel Dinahet, had told them the tale of a strange, dormant town that you could see from afar. They saw a magnificent bay basking in sunlight, already warmed up by the new season; beneath their feet they felt the fine sand of a beach stretching away ad infinitum; they walked along beside the remains of tattered beach umbrellas; they heard the cries of thousands of birds flying over the many buildings lining the beach; and they heard the echo of the noise of waves rebounding off the walls of the deserted edifices. They were gripped by the macabre power of that monument-in-spite-of-itself, as well as by the powerful impact of that seafront, with its thousands of windows open to the wind and weather, and by that vast expanse of land abandoned by History and circumstance, They were split between being spellbound and scared, between the fascination exercised by the buildings devoid of their occupants and the respect inspired by graves, as well as drawn as much by the summons of the memory of the place as by the ghosts which still seemed to be there (scattered sounds and strange noises wafted up from the heart of the town, prompting them to imagine that human beings were still moving about in it). They were also dumbfounded by the reality of what lay before their very eyes, but, thinking that they were victims of a hallucination, they remained for quite a while transfixed by the shock of that unprecedented “situation”. They did not really know how to name what they had before them, and for a long time they remained there without speaking, incapable of making any comment, held in the grip of a powerful emotion.

Back in the town, that same evening, having negotiated the border that separates the island into two parts, they told their friends, who had stayed on the other side, about the impressions they had gleaned, as if they were coming back from a distant land, and the sensations they had had started to take shape. Among the people they talked to, Cypriot friends who had stayed in Nicosia, Androula and Yiannis, gave them the impression of hearing that narrative for the first time, as if passing strangers were telling them a story that had to do with their most private innermost depths, describing for them a place which they must have known better than anyone else. We thus learn that Yiannis had spent his childhood in that precise place—that precise place being Famagusta, this town placed outside time, whose story was only just beginning for us. A shared experience had taken place, which would have to be described and shared in order to understand what had come about, and put a name to the confusion it had given rise to—a confusion that had affected each one of them personally, but about which they felt, in a confused way, that it might similarly affect all and sundry, other people, the world.

The leading characters involved in this experience—us: already a budding group—had thus felt that there was, beneath our very eyes, something to do with a botched modernity, hampered and reduced to silence, for reasons that we did not know about in any detail. This violence meted out to the town, these marks of abandonment, which we could reckon to have been as abrupt as it had been sudden, segued into an enigma which we could, in a confused way (again), guess as having gone beyond mere local circumstances. This image of a seafront lined with buildings and concrete echoed many other (over-)developed seafronts in Europe and elsewhere, this separation and this “illegal” border conjured up many other frontiers, material and immaterial alike, which give structure to our modern economies; and the abandoned buildings definitely reminded us of other places left behind and/or neglected by our collective and personal (hi)stories. In a nutshell, we felt concerned and exercised by this place suspended in time, mistreated by History, stripped of people, and now taken over once again by a natural melancholic entropy; and we wanted to tell people about it and share it with others. A narrative was coming into being, one that would become part and parcel of the time-frame—and this book retraces an initial stage of it.

It all happened in Cyprus not long after one or two crossing-points had been opened up on the border between the two parts of the divided island: the south, where we were staying with our Greek Cypriot friends for an exhibition in which we were taking part, and the north, under Turkish occupation since the 1974 conflict.  The ghost town was called Famagusta, or, more accurately, as we would learn in due course, it involved one of the town’s  specific neighbourhoods called  Varosha, occupied by the Greek Cypriot community before it was strategically sequestrated by the Turkish army in August 1974. The town was, and still is in 2010, enclosed by a cordon of  barriers, barbed wire and plastic mesh fences and palings, guarded by soldiers. It is impossible to go inside it, and very difficult to get any direct view of the streets invaded by grass and bushes. It may be impossible to go inside the cordon, and take photographs there, but you can drive right around the town. Now devoid of its human bodies and abandoned by force, this town is a sanctuary, a place of memory, an organism doomed to a state of unavoidable entropy. Little by little vegetation is gaining ground, invading buildings already dilapidated by time, looting and the summer 1974 bombing.

Once the gust of emotion had passed, and knowing full well that such emotion is neither sufficient nor desirable when it is not propped up by a reasoned and informed line of thinking, if only to translate it into linguistic experience, we imagined ways of constructing meaning and transmitting the questions raised by this “fact” of History that we had had before our very eyes, by subjecting it to an artistic way of looking at things, and thinking about things, too. The seeming absurdity of this situation, its violence, the powerful impact it gave rise to, the inclusion of this state of affairs in a History-in-progress, which is still not giving rise to a consensus because it is still not yet written (negotiations have been endlessly broken off since 1974, and have still not culminated in any general settlement of the conflict), even when this frozen town had all the characteristics of a monument (dimension, absence of any ordinary urban functionality and use, dramatization of  space by void, an appearance of “guarded” ruins, and hence of being part and parcel of History, a place of pilgrimage for former inhabitants, and so on), all these impressions and hunches would have to be informed, nurtured and thought about as much by artists as by theoreticians come from different geographical places and different disciplinary fields. The multi-disciplinary character of the project seemed quite obvious to us. An artistic approach could not involve a dead-end in relation to any historical, geographical, anthropological and urbanistic documentation. However,  it was not necessarily a matter of imagining the different areas of knowledge introduced by specialists as pre-conditions for the artists’ work (even if some of them made this the very condition of their involvement in the project, like Victor Burgin, for example, who contributed a great deal of information, and much food for thought about the Cypriot situation), but rather a question of considering artistic creation per se as a conveyor of historical, anthropological and philosophical knowledge (forms which think). The involvement and cooperation of all those taking part in the project, with their different disciplines, and their different ways of looking at things, would be the condition underwriting the project’s validity.

If very little is known about this reality—who knows that there is a ghost town of this size on a European island?—while other “suspended spaces” represent a focal point for one and all (whether they be associated with industrial catastrophes, like the abandoned nuclear power station at Chernobyl, or whether they have to do with no man’s lands connected with political conflicts, as in Berlin, Beirut and Palestine, for example, in the History of the past few decades, or alternatively whether they serve to contain migratory ebbs-and-flows on Spanish and Italian islands, and on the various borders between Morocco and Spain), it seemed to us that the power of places deserved to be taken a broader look at, and that it was important not to be confined to the situation of Cyprus, because ‘confinement’ is invariably the risk implicit in isolated situations. Just as the Cypriot question concerns the whole of the European and Mediterranean community, and not just Greek and Turkish Cypriots—who, nevertheless, have hitherto been somewhat alone in coping with this burden--, the “suspended” part of Famagusta, which is the real nub of our research, should be able to summon and involve international artists who keep abreast of political matters and their effects on the transformation of landscapes and the state of territories. How can a real place presenting obvious signs of conflict and violence, by being shifted from the geopolitical arena to the aesthetic and artistic arena, inspire forms which, by making them (more) complex and by removing them from just their affective and political context, go beyond the expectations engendered by this kind of situation.

The political Europe of today is being constructed on a principle involving the disappearance of physical boundaries. The Schengen Area is gradually seeing  the frontiers between European Union member states being done away with, thus symbolically erasing what lay at the root of the 20th century’s world wars—twice over. Nevertheless, in specific ways and with an evident symbolic violence, border areas, buffer zones and no man’s lands are replacing previous boundaries, and ‘suspended spaces’ are punctuating European geography like so many points of tension. These various empty areas echo all the planet’s conflicts, representing, as they do, a paradoxical version thereof:  a depopulated area which conjures up a form of over-population, a lull harbingering great violence, a void evoking many different kinds of suffering.

We also knew that it would be important to bring all those thus far taking part in the project as far as Famagusta, because it was important to “be there”, in order to feel the various places in a physical sense, with all one’s body, with all one’s mind, and with all one’s memory, which, when all is said and down, is not one and the same thing. Otherwise put, what was involved was the condition of a shared experience.

The neglected and deserted—theatre of fictions

The neglected and deserted issue from the abandonment of a formerly used terrain.

Their origins are many and varied: agricultural, industrial, urban, tourist-related, and so on.

Neglected and deserted, and fallow, are synonyms.2

Gilles Clément

For an outsider’s eye, what is striking is actually the paradoxical nature of the form of abandonment that describes this town: on this island where nature reserves are colonized by tourism, as is the case with so many places around the Mediterranean, Varosha is a space neglected and deserted by History (a pocket of time and space  removed, in abeyance, dormant, in repose, a restricted fallow area, a Third Landscape as Gilles Clément puts it), a de-colonized neighbourhood, in a way. The town was first of all a space defined by human movements; it then became a place hallmarked by stability, if we may borrow the distinction made by Michel de Certeau3; the mobility of the space has given way to the stability, not to say the immobility, of the place, which is no longer applied. The history of this place has not been resolved, so it is still open-ended, and it may become a place of thought, a place for thinking. What does this sensation of void and emptiness mean? what does this deserted town signify, when the island is suffering more and more from tourist saturation in the form of  unauthorized and unplanned constructions all along its coastlines? Varosha: an island within an island. People have left the ship, and moved away to conquer other lands and other mirages, and invent other narratives.

Famagusta: a space emptied, voided and de-occupied. Spoils of war or currency, what is this emptiness and void the name of? What is this desolation the symptom of? What does this abandonment tell us? How does it echo our most archaic anthropological experiences? Famagusta is a town which History has left suspended in mid-air. Better than many other examples, it symbolizes the cleaving status quo of the Cypriot situation. But it also functions as a symbol through its form: impenetrable and unfilmable4 from within, ignored by Europe and the world, it manifests itself through an amazingly quiet tranquility, despite (or because of) the various signs of abandonment which characterize it (wild vegetation, buildings in a state of gradual decay, cranes at a standstill in mid-operation, windmills still spinning in the void). This abandoned, yet encircled zone, under surveillance, and twice separated, both from a territorial continuity (space reduced to low-level military activity and cut off from all other economic and everyday activities) and from the Greek Cypriot part to which it is still attached (priority-wise, with a promise of being handed back to its owners, most of them Greek Cypriots, in the negotiations currently under way)…is greatly coveted, not least as a result of fantasy-fuelled projections, scopic impulses, and desires to go and have a look at it, enter it, and be there. Because to the real enclosure of the place is added a virtual enclosure, the one that has been erected in imaginations ever since the introduction of the ban, whose occupying forces very ably master the effects that they have on “those being occupied”. Two experiences confirm as much. The first occurred during one of our arrests while we were making a location visit a little too close to the barrier: Turkish soldiers first led us into the town, inside the enclosure, to question us and take down our statements; they then said to us: “You’re happy, you’ve got what you were looking for—a way into the town!”  So they knew very well what we were after. The second experience occurred after a meeting with the present-day Turkish Cypriot mayor of Famagusta, Oktay Kayalp, in the Town Hall which adjoins the abandoned neighbourhood. As if he were giving us a present, the mayor authorized us to go and take a look at the town from the terrace roof of the town hall, thus enabling us to have a thoroughly novel and impressive view over the collapsed roofs and the streets invaded by vegetation—a view that was quite impossible to have from the cordon encircling the town. Here again, the mayor knew that what we all wanted was to go and have a look, with all the ambiguity and probably with all the morbid curiosity that that desire presupposed. For, in effect, Varosha has been out of bounds for more than 35 years, and has remained frozen in people’s memories since 1974, so, for some, the desire to go and become re-acquainted with the neighbourhood where they had grown up, and see if anything was still moving there, remains unsatisfied. This frustration is probably part of the effectiveness of that “kidnapping”, that “abduction”, and the Turkish army is only too well aware what its effects are, not only on the Cypriot population, but also on anyone who approaches those places. As an object of fantasy, and fiction, those places reminded us of modern film décors, the ones that Gilles Deleuze has identified as being  Time-Image films (Chris Marker’s The Jetty, Andrei Tarkovski’s Stalker, Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville). Films about ghosts, where the company of spectres replaces reality.

“In the ghost town”, says Marc Augé5, “no inhabitant will return”—just as the curve of time will not be reversed. Memory and oblivion are the conditions of the human experience. Already represented as a monument, it will not be a matter of  producing new commemorative forms of Famagusta, but of trying to imagine what goes on behind those images of façades, those many different images of façades through which the town is presented, and which act as a screen for more complex visions and thoughts, narratives in the offing, and (hi)stories to be invented. Nor, in this project, will it be a question of lending an aesthetic element to a place and situation, which result from acts of violence,  whoever their protagonists might be--artists are not, on the face of it, there to write History--, but it will be a question of  looking into that place and that  situation, and considering them with a plural but free approach, released from slogans and propaganda, from whatever side they hail. In a way, it will also be a matter of giving reality a second chance. Ghost towns are a sort of a paroxysm of the hiatus between what is perceived and what the memory suggests to us, between attention paid to the reality of detail, and attraction to what is not very perceptible. Based on the void, the voided, and the emptied, based on silence and apparent immobility, it will perhaps be possible to live in the town in a different way, to fill it, to project and try out in it new narratives which will recollect similar experiences, lived through or recounted, and documented by others or by ourselves. As a theatre for fictions to come, and décors for histories past and future, this vacant state is apt for all projections and all fantasies where science fiction has pride of place. Today’s art, working at the crossroads where visual art meets the documentary, and where aesthetics meets anthropology, which circulates on the thread of representations nurtured by reality and conveyed by freedoms of fiction, should find a natural place in this project.

Understanding the geopolitical reality of this situation will mean documenting it: gathering information, learning its History, investigating, and looking for historical sources. Each and every artist will keep the distance that seems to him or her to be the right one in relation to this knowledge. The goal of the residencies will be to propose that the artists and researchers organize one or two meetings with the people involved in these histories, make the documentation available to them, and give them information about resources, in terms of archives and documents. Because it will not be a matter of denying the History or the geopolitical reality of the situation, but rather of broaching it from the sidelines, from without, as we did when we drove around the town on each of our visits. This decision entails a special individual liaison, which will proceed by way of the History and the way of looking at things peculiar to each person, and in an approach that will own up to its subjectivity, its dead ends, and its omissions. A movement involving off-centering will be called for, as much for the organizers, most of them French, as for all the artists, and we were keen that these latter should hail from several European and adjoining countries, as well as from the two divided parts of the island of Cyprus.

Dealing together, once again, with a factor of abandonment (neglect and desertion) entailed the construction of a group of artists chosen for their supposed capacities to be able to commit themselves to this particular proposition.

Distributing the sensible6

Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives,

which, in their turn, might interfere with the imaginary landscape of a place?7

Francis Alÿs

What legitimacy can a group of artists and intellectuals, many of them foreigners, have in coming to these places and “making art”, based on this situation of conflict and political crisis? It is partly to answer this question, and by avoiding the naivety of a discourse on art claiming to be able to solve and settle conflicts, that the choice of artists was carried out (many international artistic  “operations” are initiated on the basis of this illusion, the closest example being the failure of Manifesta which was meant to take place in Cyprus in 2007.) An organic system of logic presided over the formation of the group of artists and researchers, based on the members of the original nucleus. So we set up a group the way we might have composed a score: organic and harmonic. Trusting in our hunches, looking for generosity—shift was seen as method.

We knew that the project would not be an easy one to handle, and that tensions would crop up one day or another, associated with the national and separate character of our meeting place. We also thought that different ways of looking at things, by outsiders—involved but not partisan in the sense that they would be part of the History of the conflict—would be not only helpful but also vital for our reflection about, and representation, narrative and evaluation of the situation, and these different ways of looking at things could be positive and stimulating for the Cypriot artists. The way the project progressed confirmed the fact that most Cypriots themselves were too closed off in the trauma that had affected them to feel free, naïve and  reckless, all mental attitudes which art uses to advantage, and with which it at times fuels its daring.

So we sought out artists whose work seemed to us to be concerned with issues of representations of real, perceptible and specific territories, or imaginary spaces linked to precise places and topographies. Those artists who are concerned with space and geopolitical landscapes, human movements and economic circulations, are often attached to representations which proceed by way of imagery. Many of them work with photography, film and video, so they often document the real places from which they work. So, documenting, the issue of the document, and the documentary genre are all gestures and categories that are concerned as soon as what is involved is the representation of real places and spaces. A group of artists was brought together little by little, in an almost organic way, with, on each occasion, the same desire to “entrust” the project—and more especially the confrontation with this fascinating ghost neighbourhood of Famagusta—to artists whose work, viewpoints, ways of broaching art praxis, and human qualities would allow us to hope that there would be a rich and special reaction. The consequence of this basic postulate was the markedly heterogeneous character of the group of some thirty people thus formed, with artists from very different places, and with very different ages and levels of maturity.8 French, Greek and Turkish Cypriot, Turkish, Bulgarian, English, Belgian, Italian, Albanian, Lebanese, and the like—their origins are many and represent conflict situations in the field. The various encounters were peppered with fierce and difficult discussions. What is more, we failed to sidestep certain moments of tension, but these helped us to appraise the stances—and the limits, too—of the different people involved in the project, depending on the more or less marked involvement of their country in the conflict. The human qualities, sensibility and intelligence of the situations of one and all enabled the group to go beyond the mental boundaries crying out to come to the fore. We adopted a modest and non-invasive or non-intrusive position, but we were also persuaded that, over and above the respect due to borders freely agreed upon, duly guaranteeing respect for differences and peculiarities, territories belong to everyone, and the earth is a shared asset. To feel concerned is the least anyone can expect, and why not take one’s share of responsibility in the local tension. So we felt that we were legitimately justified in focusing on a place located in Europe and situated at the same time on Europe’s outer edge—and one, in any event, that raises questions about the implications of this membership, or otherwise, in the European territory.

The group was thus by and large formed (artists can join the project as opportunities arise, when this is “self-explanatory”), and it was on the basis of the residency that we invited each person to take part or not, in order to further this adventure. The issue of funding came up, and we found financial backing at regional level. The Picardy region, the city of Amiens, as well as the Department of Cultural Affairs all helped and enabled us to organize two residencies in Cyprus, and then one at the IMEC in Caen, under the supervision of the Centre de Recherches en Arts at the Université de Picardie. We did not ask for money which might have been forthcoming from the States involved in this conflict (Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey), and they would almost certainly have turned us down. This local financial footing, subsequently added to by a share of European funding, emphasizes the capacities that regions have to initiate international projects without going through central and national organizations and authorities.

The residencies enabled the artists to move about the territory, meet people involved on both sides of the buffer zone, and take note that the abandonment of Varosha tallied with numerous villages forcibly abandoned by their Turkish Cypriot inhabitants, dispatched to the north of the island at the moment when the two communities were separated. The residencies were useful for actually experiencing the reality of the places in question, and their complex History, which is still the subject of much discussion, having still not obtained a consensus either on the part of Cypriots themselves, or on the part of the international community. Certain Greek Cypriot artists in the group had not crossed the boundary line since it was opened up in April 2003.

Taking up the narrative, finding sequels to the story, and coming up with scenarios.

Exploring the situation, thinking up its specific nature, producing works, and then putting on an exhibition, holding round tables, commissioning essays and texts, preparing a publication, and circulating the project, introducing it, enhancing it, and following it up—all these activities had to take into account the distribution of this sensible that we had elected to put to the test of a collective research project. Each stage and each part of the project had to reflect the form9 of the whole. And the whole thing had to be documented.

Documenting the experience

How is the immaterial part of the project to be described, the non-visible part, and probably, for us, the most significant part, but where the works produced will not provide all the dimensions (no obligation to have “objective” results)? We knew that an important part of this experience would take the form of discussions, exchanges, shared moments, journeys made in small groups ,  and notes taken by this person or that, in such a way as to circulate and shift in the different sites likely to produce a choreography, in the tone and content of the exchanges and interviews with people in charge of official and associative organizations, academics, and ordinary individuals. Each day during the longest residency, the one at Tochni, was an opportunity for commentaries, reflections and analyses about what was going on. Lots of photos were taken and various recordings  were made, and everyone took notes and recorded that stay in a private and personal way, as they saw fit (Mira Sanders, Filip Berte and Maïder Fortuné, who did not take part in the collective residency, also produced various drawings and samplings during their stay). Documents were produced and put together10, from Google Earth satellite views to writings by authors helping to understand the geopolitical challenges and stakes in Cyprus and Famagusta. But how were the “experience” and the emotions and actions associated with it to be described, and presented in their full scope? A spin in the Karpaz  region in the northern Turkish part of Cyprus, a meal eaten with a Greek restaurant owner in that region, a discussion in a car following a flock of sheep at  night, Katerina Attalides’s emotion on the beach at Varosha after the interview, at once agreed upon and “blocked”, with the current mayor of the town, and so on and so forth. Discussions, at times turbulent  and often hurtful or painful exchanges, some of them documented, recorded and filmed, others still etched in the memories of those involved.

Two particular projects have long-term goals: the first one involves a report with drawings and a film in several dimensions. Eric Valette made drawings from the first meetings onward, based on which he started to construct a narrative in the form of a comic strip. He made his day-to-day  drawing activity available to this project and, page by page, wrote a story with text and dialogue.

The second one involves a commission, planned at the outset, from Christian Barani, to document the sequence of events and stages of the whole project. He came up with an altogether unusual film which merits some explanation: made up of sequences of differing lengths, and edited in differing degrees, the “stuff” recorded in collective and individual situations was sent by mail “to the people featuring in the image”, to borrow his own words. In respecting everyone’s choice to appear in the images or not, Christian Barani thus constructed a potential film, made up of real sequences scattered among the various members of the group. If  people wanted to see the film in its entirety, each person receiving a sequence represented a possible editing point,  varying with each exhibition project (this material actually forms a collection from which it will be possible to draw, depending on the exhibition projects envisaged), which would act as a liaison point with another person holding another sequence. What is undoubtedly involved here is the screening of a film “extended” in time and space. The film thus performed describes both each story and the experience of the collective. Christian Barani’s “distributed” documentary film exists for the time being in a fragmented state. The rushes are distributed within a geography determined by the places where the group members live. Each person is a trustee-like holder of a piece of the project, and, for the moment, there is no overall project, even if the whole potentially makes a film (if all the sequences are put end to end). This exploded film questions cinematic exhibition in the broad sense, because it requires finding projection methods compatible with its scattered form: it will probably be necessary to “perform” it, which is to say “interpret”  and “act” the sequences in real time and in the presence of the film’s real actors, the people who are in the image.11

The large quantity of documents brought together, put together and made by the project (photos, videos, sound recordings, books, diaries, notes, drawings, and so on) encouraged us, for a while, to set up an archival platform on the Internet. The project has not been forgotten, but it has not yet managed to find its right form, and it will definitely be taken up again at a later date, because the archive issue lies at the heart of this research. At the present time, it is the artists who are producing the documents and setting up tomorrow’s archives, because they are working on both realities and on the present time. The works themselves are documents in their own right.

Producing and exhibiting, works and thoughts

While no pressure was put on the artists during the residencies, it was tacitly understood that the productions of works were going to be undertaken for those so wishing. All the artists responded at tempos which have not enabled all the works to find their definitive form for the first show in Amiens. The exhibition project at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens, like all the other programmes in the project, has come about through a close collaboration and a professional involvement on the part of those running the Maison (Gilbert Fillinger and Françoise Roux), who have worked with the artists from the Caen residency right up to the exhibition itself. In this very special venue for a moment of “Culture” in France—one involving the democratic circulation of works and artists in open, partition-free spaces--the general curator, the artists and the collective have all prepared themselves; it has actually been necessary to adapt to the specific nature of this welcoming, open-minded venue which, however, is not really made for classic presentations.

Translating the projects into works was a collective undertaking, but above all owes a debt to Brent Klinkum, who followed and monitored each proposition with attentiveness and professionalism, here again. In the wake of the two residencies and the large number of exchanges, it was proposed that the artists produce one or more works. The production of and cooperation with the art works complied with diverse forms of logic and method, adapted as far as possible to the work of each person and the relative importance it took on, based on the different individual artistic itineraries: accomplishment of a research project, a new avenue, the first sizeable work, parallel project, and the like. Listening to the artists and, above all, the effort to understand the project in relation to the moment and to each artist’s works, made it possible to operate with the works, sometimes taking them a step or two further, or in another direction, but always respecting the proposal in its coherence and its incorporation within an individual path.

In tandem with the production of the works, a series of round tables, video programmes, papers and texts was introduced by way of an international conference, designed to help prepare this particular publication and provide some grist to the mill of overall thinking about the project. Organized mainly by Seloua Luste Boulbina under the general title Entre mondes/Between Worlds, discussions involving two participants opened up a variety of issues associated with the specific situation of Famagusta, and the philosophical scope of this post-tourist monument. “In these places as in many others--but here there is a blinding effect--several worlds are lodged in just one. The fractures and frictions between these worlds are especially perceptible here. As such, Famagusta is a good example of the off-centerings which make between worlds the world we are living in.”12

While Brent Klinkum was responsible for the overall curatorship of the Suspended Spaces#1 exhibitions, the important choices and decisions were also discussed, shared and made within a team composed of Daniel Lê, Françoise Parfait and Eric Valette. The collective system was one of the principles decided upon at the very start of the general Suspended Spaces project, with those who injected the initial energy into what was, at that early stage, just a hunch: Françoise Coblence, Androula Michael and Yiannis Toumazis. The energy and concentration demanded by an endeavour such as this can only be developed through the overlapping forces of a group of individuals welded together by one and the same desire.

It took three years of hard work for the Suspended Spaces#1 project to see the light of day. Its brief, now, is to migrate, and carry on its off-centering movement, shifting towards other suspended spaces where experiences past and forthcoming will make it possible to carry on the quest for new ways of raising the issues and asking the questions that concern us all. For, in art, as in philosophy and other activities of the mind, the renewal of issues and questions matters more than the answers to them, even if, in the case of Cyprus, a political response would help to find a way out of the dead end that leads to Varosha.

Françoise Parfait

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods