Contested spaces as spectacles

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the role of scenographic methodologies in revisiting spaces associated with political conflict and trauma. In doing so, the author presents her artistic research and design process behind the art installation ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’, the exhibition of the Cyprus National participation in the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2023 which places the occupied city of Famagusta, abandoned since 1974, as a contested-space-becoming-spectacle. The author describes how analysing the space through a scenographic lens allows a close examination of the city’s materiality and how this, in turn, becomes the source for artistic creation. Focusing on the scenographic process of scaling down, sculptural maquettes and portable models in walking practices are approached as symbolic objects for communicating issues on displacement, space politics, surveillance and agency. In that sense, scenographic methodologies are discussed as thinking processes, a political act of resistance, and a tool for negotiating artistic practices and real spaces of conflict. This process is defined as ‘scenography reversed’, where a real place becomes a dramatised scene, allowing alternative understandings that expand beyond hegemonic narratives. The article places Famagusta as a paradigm of contested spaces and questions whether scenographic methodologies can be a possible approach to reconciliation and conflict resolution.

Introduction

In the concept description of the Exhibition of Countries and Regions, the curatorial team of the 15th Edition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ, 2023) assigned to performance practitioners a significant responsibility, arguing that they ‘play an especially important role in society: to imagine, visualize, and even create rare visions of the future’. The unique power of performance design and scenography, in turn, is ‘to immerse one’s mind and body in our possible futures, to give hope, and so become a catalyst for positive change’ (PQ, 2023). But what if the power of performance and theatre to immerse us into future events was also, primarily, the power to recognise possible worlds next to us, inside or around us, within the often overlooked and yet familiar sets of our histories and lives? Could we reconsider those worlds through the lens of scenography as a methodology for understanding larger social and political challenges as they relate to space organisation and reconfiguration? Can we actually give hope where it is needed the most, in places afflicted by conflict and trauma, and in doing so ‘become a catalyst for positive change’ (PQ, 2023)? One thing is certain: adopting this course of inquiry implies both thinking scenographically the world we inhabit, as proposed by Hann (2019), and inhabiting scenographically the complex of thoughts, sensations, experiences, relationships and images that constitute our worlds.

Reflecting on the history or histories of conflicts, the art installation I designed for the Cyprus National participation, in PQ23, was precisely a comment on contested spaces within the framework of scenographic practices. The title of Cyprus’ exhibition, which won the Golden Triga award, was ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’ and it was based on the abandoned city of Famagusta, located in the occupied area on the east coast of the island. In this article, I discuss how I approached the city of Famagusta and issues of politically contested spaces, as well as the use of scenographic methodologies in creating alternative understandings that expand beyond hegemonic narratives. I call this process ‘scenography reversed’, where a real place becomes a dramatised scene. This article is an attempt to explain the details of this methodological process. In doing so, I am brought to reflect on the artistic concept development, art installation design and construction, as well as the devising and performing of a walking journey that was then included in the installation as video documentation.

It must be specified that the structure of this article results from a technique similar to the one that guided my creative practice, that being assemblage. Paragraphs and sections are fragments examining the ramifications of my research and conceptual journey, as well as observations and associations from the point of view of the spectator, maker and performer. Accordingly, the whole follows a heuristic approach of inquiry which allows me to acknowledge the fluctuating state of conceptual boundaries when it comes to contested spaces. I contend that any inquiry in/on contested spaces requires a continuous defiance against socio-political biases to avoid the manipulation of trauma and erasure of contradictions customarily sought by partisan simplification – which is to say that this methodological choice is a way to remain faithful both to the characteristics of the art installation produced and to the present fragmented state of the ghost city of Famagusta.

Contested spaces as stages

The artwork I designed for the Cyprus National participation in PQ23 was a minimalistic art installation consisting of three sculptural maquettes¹ positioned close to each other, in the middle of the 5 × 4 m space allocated to Cyprus in Hall 13 of the Holešovice Market. They were partly architectural objects, theatrical stages or sets and partly sculptural impermanent structures. No partitions or separations were constructed around the space. The maquettes were placed on top of metal structures inspired by military watchtowers, higher than the average eye level (Figure 1). Two maquettes enclosed monitors in their centre that showed video footage of the city from before and after 1974, while the monitor in the third maquette showed a walking performance that began in Cyprus and ended in Prague. The maquettes were inspired by abandoned buildings in Famagusta, a city marked by war and conflict since 1974.

Figure 1. ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’, Cyprus National Exhibition in PQ23. Photo by Melita Couta.

The proposal to think of the city of Famagusta as a topos² for connecting the specificity of Cyprus with the PQ23 theme RARE (Fantová 2021), was initiated by Marina Maleni, the curator of the Cyprus National participation.³ Previously, she was involved in the project EMERGENCE where a workshop addressing aspects of past political and cultural frictions focused precisely on Famagusta and Nicosia through scenographic inquiries.⁴ My own artistic practice had also addressed the issue of contested spaces, such as the project STATE, at the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival in Nicosia in 2022, which enabled a synergy between Marina Maleni and me.⁵ In the summer of 2022, I was commissioned by The Cyprus Theatre Organisation to develop the artistic research in terms of concept and design and create the artwork that was presented in PQ23.

The past decades have seen contemporary performance and scenographic practices being non-exclusive to the theatrical stage. Site-specific performances, urban interventions, actions in public places, and alternative real-life spaces, often including their own narratives and politics, propose space as author and scenography as a meaning-making process. As argued by McKinney and Palmer, scenography can be understood ‘as a mode of encounter and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments’ (2017, 2). My own investigation brought me not only to question how we can understand places of conflict and connect with them through scenographic methodologies but also to ask how we can experience real places as scenographic spaces and therefore create alternative narratives to replace the pre-existing ones. To address and engage with such questions, I proposed the use of scenographic methodologies as thinking processes, a political act of resistance, and a tool for negotiating artistic practices and real spaces of conflict.

A brief history of Cyprus: conquerors and conquered land

In order to expand on contested spaces, I must make a brief survey of the history of Cyprus and give content and context to what I refer to as ‘conflict’ and ‘trauma’. Cyprus’ strategic geographical position in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, between the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, has marked its history from antiquity until today with wars, successive invasions and conquerors. In its modern history, Cyprus became a protectorate of the United Kingdom in 1878 and then part of the colonies. During the British rule, disagreements and conflicts between the two communities of the island’s inhabitants, the Greek Cypriots (77 per cent of the population) and the Turkish Cypriots (18 per cent), led to escalating inter-communal violence. In 1960, Cyprus became an independent state, the Republic of Cyprus. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1974, a coup d’état, backed by the Greek military Junta, overthrew the government, and a few days later the Turkish army invaded Cyprus. It seized about 36 per cent of the island’s territory in the north, an area that remains under occupation. Famagusta was captured in August 1974, prior to which the Greek Cypriots had left their homes. A large section of the city was immediately fenced off by the Turkish army and remained inaccessible until October 2020.

Since 1974, the conflict has remained in a stalemate. A separation line between north and south called the buffer zone, also known as the Green Line, extends 180 kilometres across the island and is controlled by United Nations (UN) forces. The buffer zone crosses through the historical centre of the capital, Nicosia, making it the last divided capital in the world. Over the years, political negotiations on a diplomatic level have tried to solve the so-called ‘Cyprus Problem’, but with no success. Therefore, for the past 49 years, the presence of an underlying trauma embedded in an unresolved conflict, and the sense of a collective political and human failure, has marked the Cypriot identity. The history and politics of the conflict that led to the present status quo and de facto partition are long and complex and a deeper engagement extends beyond the scope of this article. What is certain is that the situation in Cyprus, a divided land, the presence of military borders, and stagnated political negotiations are neither unique nor singular. They echo other contested spaces in the world where difficult histories and trauma have left, or are leaving at the present moment, their mark on places and people.

Because of this background and being a Cypriot myself, topics related to history, memory and identity are reoccurring in my work. I have no other choice but to think that it is within the role of art to look into these awkward histories, these awkward spaces, to voice uncertainties, and, when possible, to propose another direction, another narrative.

Revisiting contested spaces and histories through scenographic methodologies

The process behind my work for ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’ unfolded in three parallel directions which I consider as scenographic processes. These were the research on the topic and concept which led to the development of the artistic design, the making of the installation presented in the exhibition and, finally, a reflection on walking practices as strategies for claiming the space. Researching Famagusta meant looking into the past to understand how the layers of history survive in the city’s present state. I consulted audiovisual, documentary and archive material from The Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation which spanned the period between 1960 and 1974. Part of the footage I found was edited and projected on monitors inside the art installation, with the permission of CyBC. Then, collecting first-hand testimonies from former residents of Famagusta, listening to and recording their memories gave me access to lived experiences, outlining the image of a cosmopolitan and vibrant city, a popular international tourist destination. In parallel, the photographic material I collected from residents and visitors from before 1974 gave me a visual apprehension of the genius loci of the city.⁶ After the Turkish invasion, the visual representation of the city radically changed. It was replaced by imagery of devastation, abandonment and decay as ruins became the fascination of a few photographers who managed to take pictures of the enclosed city with and without the permission of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus, known as UNFICYP. In October 2020, the occupying forces opened up a part of the enclosed city, called Varosha, against UN Security Council Resolution 550, allowing entrance after 46 years.⁷ This decision was significant as it violated the UN Security Council’s closure which considers attempts to settle any part of Varosha by people other than its inhabitants as inadmissible and calls for the transfer of this area to the administration of the UN. Famagusta, a real-life time capsule, subsequently attracted thousands of visitors and tourists who photographed, filmed and posted their images on social media and stock photography sites. Tracing the representation of the city through internet sources, which included advertisements for guided tours of Famagusta and booked excursions, allowed me to understand the extent to which the city had been transformed into a tourist attraction site, a marketable spectacle of the macabre – what is commonly referred to as dark tourism (Figure 2). These tours promise a unique experience and up-close view of the war-affected, abandoned and decayed city, from the comfort of an air-conditioned bus dropping tourists at the entrance of the enclave and the leisure of a boat trip along the coastline (Palate 2019). ‘Famagusta Ghost Town’ is advertised on popular websites such as www.dark-tourism.com as well as being featured in a Netflix TV documentary called Dark Tourist.⁸

Figure 2. Famagusta seafront June 2022. View of the abandoned buildings of the enclave. Photo by Melita Couta.

On the other hand, the history of Famagusta became the subject of academic and cultural projects that sought to analyse its political status and envision a new approach of dealing with space and trauma. These include the ‘Famagusta New Museum’ (FNM) initiated by Yiannis Toumazis in 2016,⁹ the ‘Hands-on Famagusta’ project and web platform led by Socratis Stratis,¹⁰ the walking tours of Historic Cyprus guided by Anna Marangou¹¹ and ‘The Famagusta Ecocity Project’ co-founded by Vasia Markides.¹² Finally, my research on the present status of Famagusta would have been incomplete if I had not made the journey inside the formerly enclosed city myself. Beginning in July 2022 and continuing throughout the first half of 2023, I have visited the ghost town of Famagusta several times, allowing myself to have a direct physical response to the space by observing and documenting the place and the activities of the visitors within.

During the 46 years of enclosure, nature took over the streets and buildings with overgrown plants and wild vegetation (Flyn 2021, 54–56). The contrast is striking between thorn bushes, tall thistles, endemic species like the Cypriot broom (Genista sphacelata), and buildings marked with signs of forced entry and looting. It is a vision of a city caught mid-action, suspended in time as the inhabitants fled overnight in August 1974, an area where flora and fauna reassert their rights as immemorial dwellers. At the same time, in the middle of this seemingly indeterminate expenditure of nature’s forms and energies, multiple surfaces emerge as sites of inscription, calling for interpretation through a scenographic lens. The jagged edges of broken windows and shards, bullet impacts, collapsed roofs and awning structures are as many signifiers articulated onto ambiguous signified, awaiting their deciphering.

However, it is a difficult task to make sense of the multiplicity of signs one encounters within the abandoned city. For one thing, any visitor who is not completely deprived of ethical consciousness finds themselves in the conflicted inner state triggered by sites of trauma, where fascination, amazement, or curiosity arise simultaneously with disbelief, grief or outrage. It is as if the ambiguity of the external space mirrors the ambivalent state of the visitor who knows they should not be there (following ethical injunctions, safety instructions, political recommendations), and who nonetheless chooses to be there. Of course, this is only true provided the visitor looks for the signs – tries to see, acknowledge and read the multilayered inscription of trauma in the very materiality of its environment – in an attempt to unravel the decayed urban texture. This is precisely what I tried to do and the approach I kept in mind when entering the ghost city.

Experiencing the city

The following is an account of observations from my first visit to Famagusta.

Approaching the entrance gate of the enclosed city, fenced by metal barriers, I found myself confronted with the paradoxical feeling of arriving at an adventure theme park. An ice cream truck was parked just a few metres away from the entrance while an automated bicycle rental station offered hourly rates for cycling into the enclave. Near the gate, a large panel informed visitors that the enclosed city is monitored by a 24-hour CCTV surveillance system and entrance is only allowed on foot during specific opening hours. Additional details on the panel warned visitors of possible life-threatening dangers such as the presence of wild, poisonous animals within the city’s perimeter, rubble or parts of the buildings collapsing and hidden wells and septic pits on the ground. All these exaggerated hazards conflated into a promise of adventure. The abandoned urban area with its dispersive effect on attention, offering very little in terms of ‘sights’, seemed to warrant an extra layer of paranoid ideation to keep the visitors engaged. Yet walking and cycling were only allowed through risk-free, newly asphalted designated paths marked by ropes and signs. Photographs could only be taken from areas open to circulation, except for drones, which I understood were permitted to fly over the city. Amidst the ruins, one discovered a tightly organised, regulated and controlled space.

Crossing the turnstile and entering the city, my first encounter was an outdoor tourist cafe, more bicycle rental stations, and a small souvenir shop. Walking a few metres down the road, the scenery radically changed. I saw empty buildings like carcasses, broken and collapsing from decay. I observed voids and holes where doors, windows, and balconies used to be, traces of names on empty advertising panels and store signs where only rusted metal structures remain. Grids, frames and barriers were blocking entrances of shops and houses on the street level, but a glimpse inside these buildings, where that was possible, showed traces of past human activities, whether looting or distractions (Figure 3). The sight was devastating and extraordinary. I had the impression of walking into a place where bustling city life had violently stopped, while at the same time, I was struggling to grasp and retain the reality of it all under the accumulation of parasitic post-apocalyptic images: I Am Legend, The Last of Us, The Road … Even the architecture that is so characteristic of the Cypriot modernist idiom (Fereos and Phokaides 2006), with the extensive use of exposed reinforced concrete, patterned brise-soleils and cantilevers such as in the work of Stavros Economou and J+A Philippou, refers to a place that is left in the past dream of a certain future. The city was silent and still, apart from the sound of waves from the seashore and palm trees rustling in the wind. This came as a strong contrast with the lively and often loud presence of tourists and visitors on bicycles and golf carts, strolling around or sunbathing on the beach in front of ruins.

Figure 3. View of Famagusta enclave June 2022. Access is not permitted beyond the rope fences. Photo by Melita Couta.

Beyond the raw reality of the space, the city has become a spectacle, a decor of trauma, a theme park of the consequences of war. Tourists take selfies in front of ruined houses and then post them on social media, while parkour teams use the rubble as a playground¹³ (Figure 4). Trauma gives way to leisure and blissful carelessness as Famagusta’s alignment of facades becomes the stage set of an abandoned city frozen in the past – which is to say that the city becomes the set of itself, alienated from both its past history and trauma, despite the multiple signs inscribed in the materiality of architectural and urban structures. The idea of scenography reversed comes from this tension between the city’s reality and its becoming a space of representation. The question is not to unearth the authenticity of the place from beneath the disruption inflicted by historical events, as no site is ever characterised by any original or authentic state, urban environments even less than others. The question is how to acknowledge and process aesthetically the apparent identification of the city with the stage set, enacted under the guise of a family-friendly leisure area, since Famagusta has been reopened to the public. For it is precisely the conflation of the enclosed city as the prototype site with the reopened city as a representation of itself that enables politically biased narratives and entertainment industries to take hold of Varosha. In that sense, scenography reversed attempts to give back autonomy (a form of agency, as will be discussed later) to a city that lost (that is in fact continuously losing) its meaning as a living space because it is presented and experienced as a screen for the visitors’ fantasies, a sterilised and placid reproduction of the disasters of war and, ultimately, a shadow of itself.

Figure 4. Tourists in Famagusta enclave May 2023. Photo by Melita Couta.

In order to avoid the narratives of partisan politics, it was thus important to recognise that the very materiality of the city is the strongest channel of communication. The layering of events, recorded as historical or escaping the records, is evident in the traces of violence from bullet and bomb impacts on buildings and in the marks left by the passage of time on man-made materials and uncultivated plots. Even if the city is silent, the buildings and adjacent wastelands ‘talk’. The encounter with the city was for me the reading of a text filled with micronarratives of an event that took place 49 years ago, and that has been unfolding ever since.

Scenographic methodologies: scenography reversed

These observations and reflections, in phenomenological terms of multi-sensorial perception, presence, movement and materiality, are what I name scenographic methodologies, understood not only as the process of designing and constructing a space but also as a thinking process of reading and understanding a place. In that sense, scenographic methodologies in my work refer to a series of practices that include historical, political, cultural and social research in parallel with an analysis of space based on materiality, scale, movement and perspective experienced through sensory stimuli.

I thus embrace the term scenography, instead of performance design, for its polysemy: having its origins in the ancient Greek skēnē, a tent or hut, the term is first mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics as σκηνογραφίαν. Σκηνή is also understood in modern Greek as an event happening in space and time and perceived as a cohesive and coherent unit. I am interested by the viewer’s capacity to isolate a meaningful scene within the mass of material information found in places of conflict. Approaching the enclosed city of Famagusta through a series of singular scenes became a strategy to engage with politically contested spaces as compositions, assemblages of tactile elements defined by time, place, matter, and cohesion. It also allowed me to account for perceptions of the city expanding beyond perceptual shocks of pathos caused by traumatised places. Therefore, what I call scenography reversed constitutes a form of political act of resistance, a tool for reflecting on awkward histories and trauma.

In scenography reversed, contested places are examined and analysed through a scenographic lens, in order to build alternative understandings that expand beyond hegemonic narratives. It constitutes an autonomous methodology that does not necessarily aim at the production of performance design (although it can lead to artistic creation) but acts as a frame of thinking that enables new production of meaning. In its simplest form, scenography reversed disrupts the hierarchical order normally associated with a classical approach to theatre making, that being from text to stage. I refer to text here not only as literature or script but as any pre-existing historico-political narrative. In scenography reversed, space becomes the generator of content. It involves a process of observing remains, alterations and signs inscribed into and inflicted on the materiality of a contested space in order to ‘excavate’ material traces of the contemporary past. In places where conflict has left its markings, the questions raised might shift from ‘who is responsible’ or ‘who is to blame’ to ‘how does the space perform’ and ‘how is this performativity related to memory’.

It is precisely on this point that scenography reversed differs from views on expanded scenography that examine various spaces and trends of hybrid theatrical practices and the contribution of scenography within contemporary performing arts. Although the focus is on decentralising scenography from a craft-based to a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary praxis, the examples discussed in Scenography Expanded (McKinney and Palmer 2017) stay within the area of space design and examine the relationship of spectators to spaces and performers. Scenography reversed functions both inside and outside the scope of performance-oriented practices.

In that sense, my proposition owes a lot to Hann’s (2019, 28) dynamic concept of scenographics as ‘interventional acts of place orientation’ related both to a perception of the ‘othering’ of a space's characteristics or norms and to the consequent opening onto potential actions. In the case of Famagusta, however, it quickly became obvious that contested and traumatised spaces involve a coefficient of ‘othering’ upending the very perception of normativities and deviations. The scale of alterations is such that the boundaries are blurred between, on the one hand, the perception of organisational, social, political norms and, on the other hand, the recognition of spatial markers inviting the viewer to question those constraints. Consequently, contested spaces belong to a different category than the constructed scenographic situations that Hann (2019, 99–117) also examines as ‘scenographics’ and which include instances of interior design, installation art and gardening. If scenography reversed retains the notion of place orienting, it is as a method to make sense of spaces that were by no means crafted or designed for atmospheric or performative purposes. The method is positioning itself before the crafting of scenes and situations, and it aims at recognising, organising, and understanding the perception of contested spaces through scenographic traits and strategies. Which is to say that finally, scenography reversed examines beyond the performance space how, in Hannah's (2019, xvi) words, ‘space performs’ and is ‘an inherently active entity’, thus constituting itself as what she proposes as event-space.

The maquette as a game of gaze and scale: spectators and spectres

In the early stages of my design process, the question arose as to how to represent my experience of an entire city in an exhibition space of 20 m², allocated to each National Participant by PQ in Holešovice Market in Prague. The direction I proposed was one quite familiar to scenographers and space design practitioners: a process of reduction. Bachelard refers to miniatures in the literature as objects of imagination. He writes: ‘the cleverer I am in miniaturising the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature’ (1994, 150). While Bachelard proposes that a miniature is a reduced space of concentrated meaning, Levi-Strauss argues that a miniature as a scaled-down object is comprehended at once and as a whole and therefore, as in the case of a child’s doll house, it is perceived as harmless (1962). Reflecting on notions of possession and perception, I have proposed the creation of maquettes not only as devices of imagination but as objects encompassing social and political issues through affect. In that respect, they are also ‘epistemic tools that consistently produce and communicate knowledge’ (Brejzek and Wallen 2018, 11).

Three sculptural maquettes composing the scenographic installation are based on existing buildings in Famagusta, where iconic architectural realisations of the modernist era are situated on the city’s waterfront, their horizontally ribboned windows facing the sea. These buildings used to accommodate hundreds of visitors and residents from all over Cyprus, Europe and the Middle East. They now stand as uncanny reminders of a distant past. My maquettes do not follow a specific scale but are rather deconstructed, free interpretations of what remains in memory, both my own and the very memory of the site. By scaling down places associated with trauma and conflict, one can look into them with a sense of critical distance, with a gaze stripped of emotional and ideological conditioning, in order to possibly achieve a form of objectivity when relating to these places (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Detail of maquette with monitor inside its centre showing footage from Famagusta in summer 2022. Photo by Melita Couta.

The process of designing and exhibiting these sculptural maquettes consequently evolved into an exploration of the complexity of the ‘object’ caught in a web of perceptual relationships. The viewing perspective became very important as the dynamic relationship between object and viewer gained a critical role. I positioned the maquettes on structures that reference military watchtowers, higher than the average eye level, making it difficult for the visitors to look inside without raising their eyes or stretching their neck. The watchtower, a dominant feature of the buffer zone in Cyprus, obviously refers to the military presence of the UN, Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot armies monitoring the area. But beyond this geo-political association, it connotes as a structure and as a symbolic object the act of enforced observation and surveillance, hinting at the 24 hour CCTV cameras inside the enclosed area of Famagusta. I like to think of my design as a way to address the old problem of who is watching whom. Are we, spectators, watching the city or is the city watching us? Are cameras and surveillance systems watching us watching the city? Who is the viewer and who is the object of perception? The raised sculptural maquettes imply that the building is watching the viewer as much as the viewer is looking at the building. Both the sculptures and, by extension, the buildings of the city were given agency and authority over the viewers as they seemed to look down at them from above. In turn, the viewers were compelled to peek through the openings of the maquette, small doors and windows constraining their access to what is inside the buildings. This mild disciplining of the viewers’ bodies evoked ideas of permission, permissiveness and voyeurism, thus transposing within the exhibition space some affective and political aspects of the actual experience of the ghost city of Famagusta.

In fact, the game of multiple gazes initiated by the installation finds its resolution in a real and effective surveillance system. While visitors are looking at and into the maquettes, they are simultaneously being monitored by a CCTV camera positioned inside one of the sculptures and their moving image is projected on a small screen installed farther away on the watchtower structure of a different maquette. Thus, the maquette’s agency is not only a metaphor, and the power dynamics of spectator and spectacle are reversed. The question arises once again as to who is watching whom, but with emphasis this time on the culture of surveillance. Are the viewers watching the exhibits willingly submitting to a form of surveillance while the maquettes are monitoring them (Figure 6)?

Figure 6. Detail of art installation showing footage of CCTV camera recording from inside the maquette. Photo by Melita Couta.

Monitoring involved in that case both image capture and display. Each of these three maquettes had a screen inside its centre, where video footage was playing in a loop. The videos showed moving images of the past, the present and what could represent a potential future. Specifically, the first one showed black and white videos of Famagusta around the 1960s, taken from the digital archive of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. They included scenes from documentaries about the cosmopolitan life of Famagusta and reportages on leisure activities like water sports, and special events like the yearly Orange Festival and street parades. Within a second maquette was shown colour footage from Famagusta’s present derelict state, which I filmed during my visits. The spatial relationship of interior and exterior is reversed, as footage of outdoor scenery, shot from the viewpoint allowed by designated paths, becomes the indoor space, inner landscapes of memory (Figure 7). The screen in the third and central maquette showed a walking performance from Famagusta to Prague which I will discuss in one of the following sections.

Figure 7. Detail of maquette with monitor inside its centre showing archive footage from Famagusta in the 1960s. Photo by Melita Couta.

The videos inside the maquettes act as a film installation in which different temporalities of events coexist and overlap. People shown in the archive videos become spectres of the past, replaced by spectators in a ghost city. Therefore, the relationship between spectacle and spectres reminds us that ‘places are simultaneously living and spectral, containing the experience of the actual moment as well as the many times that have already transpired and become silent – though not necessarily imperceptible – to the present’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013, 395).

Materiality as production of meaning

I approached the design process and creation of my work as an assemblage technique. Starting with two-dimensional collages, I chose visual elements from the cityscape of Famagusta that remained strong in my memory after my visits. It is well known that collage as a technique frees the creation process from linear perspective imperatives and generally from a rationality based on a logico-mathematical interpretation of space, scale and positioning. Unpredictable outcomes were produced, and new relationships between material elements generated unforeseen meanings. Similarly, the three-dimensional maquettes do not aim at faithfully reproducing an entire building or building compound but shift their motive and purpose out of the field of minute reproduction traditionally associated with model making. The displacement of model-making conventions is further emphasised by the use of materials referring to the buildings in Famagusta, grey cardboard, wood and metal, assembled with found objects such as ceramic bricks, concrete slabs and beach sand collected during my visits to the ghost city. These materials are left untreated, unpainted and undecorated, functioning both as structure and texture, echoing the principles of modern architecture that place function over decoration (Fereos and Phokaides 2006). Light tubes crossing on top of or through the maquettes, with their entangled wires running down the structure, reference the 1970s fluorescent tube lights exposed in the shattered advertising panels of Famagusta, while setting at the same time an imaginary horizon over the buildings, a disjunctive line whose cold glow contrasts with the dull roughness of found material.

Accordingly, the various elements are roughly assembled with clamps and bonding agents that temporarily hold the parts together as support structures, where the technique of supporting not only produces objects composed by multiple parts but formulates relationships to context (Condorelli 2009). The resulting assemblage suggests that the maquette is not perfectly finished but is ‘under construction’ or ‘deconstructed’, revealing its foundations, articulations, scaffolds, load-bearing elements. It is caught in the process of its making or mending, fragile, interstitial like the city, that appears in an ‘in-between stage’, an incomplete object perceptible in a state of expectation, just about to fall apart or about to be finished. Which is to say, in artistic terms, that the maquettes are a ‘study’ of a situation that is unresolved, very much like the city’s political status. In that sense, they also point to the primary function of model making which is to project and anticipate a future realisation, a future resolution.

Although some of the characteristics just discussed are clearly drawn from modernist artistic and architectural paradigms, a conscious decision of my design was to leave the maquettes as neutral as possible and to avoid precise markers of location, language, and cultural identities in order to propose archetypes of urban places of abandonment and destruction rather than commemorative monuments relating to a specific place and time. This enables a reading that expands beyond the 1974 events in Cyprus and connects with other global histories where trauma has left its mark on places and people. In this respect, the maquettes are not only in-between, but abject spaces in the sense given by Kristeva (1982) to this term. They realise an irruption of the impersonal into spaces of trauma, potentially triggering uneasy feelings of horror because of the breakdown of meaning effected by their composite nature coupled with the exhibition of an inner materiality akin to a reminder of our own mortality (Figure 8).

Figure 8. ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’, Cyprus National Exhibition in PQ23. Photo by Melita Couta.

This reflection on materiality as production of meaning leads me to propose that the design and making of a sculptural maquette in PQ23 is also a comment on scenographic practices today. At a time when the use of spatial virtual reality software is becoming increasingly popular among artists and designers, as shown quite extensively in PQ19, the process of painstakingly hand-making a maquette seems outdated. Yet the physical presence of these sculptures, their poetic materiality, the affectual relationship to the viewer challenging scale, distance, height, obstruction and discovery, all these elements suggest a revisit of scenographic tools and processes based on tactile manipulation. These maquettes are not simply artefacts or studies for a stage production but are regarded as autonomous models, conceptualised and built to be independent objects, in the manner extensively discussed by Brejzek and Wallen (2018, 11–18). The authors argue that autonomous models are cosmopoietic in forming their own world without calling for further external development. In other words, what matters is that these maquettes stand by themselves and do not await any theatre production or architectural construction to reach their full potential. Instead, they act as imagination devices inasmuch as they invite the viewer to fill in their gaps, their apertures and their void. Thus, these small windows, doors and balconies become larger gates opening both outwards and inwards, towards alternate socio-political futures and redefined intimate narratives. They remind us that large is contained in small (Bachelard 1994, 157).

The process that led me to the conceptualisation and realisation of these maquettes is an example of scenography reversed in practice. Here the scenographic method of space compression resulting in a maquette communicates complex issues of conflict and trauma through symbolic representations while suggesting a future resolution.

Movable buildings – unmovable memories: future perspectives

Earlier in this article, I discussed the creation of the three maquettes in ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’ as autonomous sculptural artworks containing video images documenting the past and present states of Famagusta. Archival images became the spectral inhabitants of the artworks, past dwellers turned into documents and a possible access to memory and trauma. However, giving an image of future developments raised specific challenges. How could one do so, while avoiding propagandist discourses or well-meaning but often naive narratives of mutual atonement and reconciliation? Following this idea, the final step of my creation process was to further challenge the role of the scaled-down object by making two portable maquettes, designed to be carried as backpacks, based even more closely on existing buildings of Famagusta. These miniature-building-luggages were carried by two performers, Pascal Caron and me, during a durational walking performance, which was video recorded and projected inside the central maquette of the main art installation. The performance took place in different stages between March 2023 and June 2023. It started in Cyprus and concluded in Prague on the grounds of PQ23. The following are fragments of the walking journey diary written by Caron and me during the making of the performance, here given to show the dynamic complexity at work within scenography reversed methodologies, in terms of coexisting temporalities, performativity and documentation.

March 2023: ‘We began a walking journey along the southeast coast of Cyprus, close to Larnaca International Airport, carrying the maquettes on our backs, and heading towards Famagusta. We filmed each other and also recorded from the point of view of inside the maquettes, to suggest that the art object has its own perspective and agency not only when acting as surveillance device in the exhibition space, but as a witness to the actual features of the landscapes of Cyprus. Often our coastal journey was interrupted by barriers and fences where crossing is prohibited due to military presence’. (Figure 9)

April 2023: ‘Our journey led us to Derynia, approaching what seemed to be at first a military watchtower close to the Green Line. The watchtower turned out to be set up for tourists. We paid an entrance fee, climbed up, and watched the ghost city of Famagusta through rented binoculars’.

May 2023: ‘We crossed through the Green Line from the South to the North of the island. At police checkpoints, we showed our identity cards to officers both of the Republic of Cyprus and the de facto state of the North. No questions were asked about our backpacks’.

May 2023: ‘We arrived at the coast of Famagusta. At that instant, the symbolic maquettes became the real buildings of the city. We decided to leave them outside the gates of the ghost city. Carrying the backpacks inside felt redundant. We entered the enclave. We spent hours walking along the deserted streets, looking at the abandoned buildings, amongst tourists who like us were contemplating this macabre spectacle, taking pictures and videos’.

June 2023: ‘Our journey continued to Prague. Departing from Larnaca airport in Cyprus and arriving at the airport in Prague, we carried the maquettes on our backs, inside aeroplanes and duty-free areas, through passport checks, and filmed each other. Again, nobody asked any questions about our backpacks’.

June 2023: ‘In Prague, we took the metro and tram and finally arrived at the exhibition space of PQ, in Holešovice Market, where we left our maquettes to be reunited with the other exhibits of ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’. (Figure 10)

Figure 9. Walking performance in May 2023, Cyprus southeast sea coast. Photo by Melita Couta.

Figure 10. Walking performance in June 2023, Prague metro. Photo by Melita Couta.

As a praxis of experiencing and connecting with the physical space of Famagusta and the politics of land separation in Cyprus, the walking performance unfolded multiple layers of symbolic acts and meaning. To start with, it operated a shift from blind to conscious performativity of walking by following a coastline cluttered with disruptive obstacles and constructions associated, for some, with the Green Line, for others with touristic resorts and residential areas. One must keep in mind that Cyprus is particular in that any spatial and socio-normative restriction can always be subsumed under the overarching limit of the militarised separation line, because the enormity of the latter somehow predetermines the experience of the former. This means that any awareness brought forth by performance art must face, at some point, issues related to the latent conflict and actual contested space as they are inscribed onto the land itself, in its very landscapes, and also onto the bodies. In this context, walking became a way to experience and ‘read’ this inscription.

Concerning the scaled-down portable maquettes, it is interesting to point out that in Greek one of the words used for ‘building’ or ‘property’ is the word ακίνητο, which literally means unmovable. Our walking performance explored the ambiguous opposition between the unmovable buildings of Famagusta and the mobile structures carried on our backs. Taking into account the fact that neither Caron nor I are actual refugees from Famagusta, we acted as placeholders (both taking the place of and holding the buildings) performing an ambiguous going-back-home, in order to show that the tension between familiarity and strangeness is disrupted in particular ways in contested spaces. How does forced displacement affect the idea and experience of ‘home’? What does it mean to carry one’s ‘home’ on one’s back, where ‘home’ is but the shell for narratives and lived memories connected to and collected within a space that is no longer synonymous with warmth and protection? Does one ever stop carrying one’s home even when the familiar place is no longer accessible, or no longer exists?

In the case of Famagusta, the buildings and urban texture remain – not intact, but they remain – as the image of a lost past, of a lost time, and as a promise of lawful future recovery. This particular relationship to the material structure of what once was home calls to mind the un-homely sense of disorientation of the Freudian Unheimlich (Freud 2003), as the dispossessed carry within themselves a decisive ambivalence towards the fact that what was left behind in time also remains potentially accessible ahead in space. ‘The correlation between movement and progress is broken and the subject succumbs to a feeling of ungroundedness and spatio-temporal disjointedness’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013, 396), which can give rise to the uncanny. In every photo and video image documenting our walking performance, Pascal Caron and I turned our back to the camera. In doing so, we did not only aim at creating the possibility of emotional identification beyond individual and collective markers. It is the reversible time structure as experienced in conflict and contested spaces that we wanted to make visible. As we moved forward towards Famagusta, the maquette faced backwards, turned towards the camera and the arrival point of past displacement, which might or might not have been a new home. The maquette-buildings consequently avoided the direction of travel as they approached the ghost city, as if they were averting their gaze from where they belonged the most in reality. The spatio-temporal reversal in the walking performance refers to scenography reversed as a multi-directional methodology.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed the role of scenographic methodologies in revisiting spaces associated with conflict and trauma through the case of Famagusta, from the position of the spectator, the maker and the performer, in an attempt to create positive views of the future. I have named this process ‘scenography reversed’ and argued that it constitutes an autonomous methodology where contested places are examined and analysed through a scenographic lens, in order to perceive alternative understandings that expand beyond hegemonic narratives and hopefully become a catalyst for positive change. More examples come to mind when thinking of contested spaces such as places of disputed borders or of ecological disasters, and heritage and pilgrimage sites. But there are other contested spaces within the often overlooked and yet familiar sets of our everyday lives that scenography reversed can help to acknowledge and to interpret beyond, or in the margins of, the range of normative usage and narratives.

The autonomous maquettes exhibited in PQ23 acted as active agents in the production of individual and collective memories that challenged the position and the role of the viewer. The walking performance emphasised and explored the complexity and multi-directionality of scenography reversed. Still, both aspects of this project (maquettes and walking performance) are clearly inviting us to imagine visions of the future. The maquettes remain incomplete, caught and presented in the process of their making, in order to suggest potential forms of realisation. The walking journey could be extended indefinitely as the performers and scaled-down buildings never actually reach their ‘home’, the place of their belonging and full actualisation. These complex time structures and liminal states are addressed to the viewer in a particular way. The walking performance, its video recording and the entire art installation of ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’ are ultimately a call for the viewers to become ‘emancipated spectators’, following Rancière’s famous expression (2021). The necessity for the spectator to abandon the role of the passive viewer and take on that of the engaged agent is precisely what we experienced as we entered the ghost city. Free from the role of placeholders, having left our maquette-backpacks at the entrance, we walked amongst tourists who, like us, were viewing the same spectacle of urban decay. If this city has turned into an entertainment site, a facade of human disaster, what is our responsibility as visitors, but also as artists, in the face of this spectacle-in-spite-of-itself? The question is a difficult one and may very well concern every kind of site of memory. What is certain is that the act of spectating itself must translate into a series of questions, extending beyond the theatre and the world of arts, to be applied in real places and situations as they unfold daily in front of our eyes. Scenography reversed is a way of seeing and then processing material information, constituted as ‘scenes’, thanks to scenographic methodologies. It is also a way to unravel the often too familiar texture of the world, in favour of better, although uncertain or even uncanny, possible worlds.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Pascal Caron with whom I had the pleasure to work during the walking performance for ‘Spectators in a Ghost City’. Moreover, Dr Caron provided me with extensive professional guidance for the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melita Couta

Melita Couta is a multidisciplinary artist born in Cyprus. She is working with sculpture, installation art, and performance and using collaborative and participatory methodologies to investigate subjects related to alternative narratives through personal and collective identities and memories. She has exhibited her work widely in Cyprus and abroad in numerous solo and group exhibitions and working extensively in theatre and performing arts as a director, performance designer and producer. In 2023, she was commissioned by the Cyprus Theatre Organisation to design the art installation for the Cyprus National participation in the 15th Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, which won the Golden Triga award. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Fine Art Programme of The University of Nicosia.

Notes

1 In this article, I refer to my artworks as maquettes (French) instead of models as the word has a closer association with sculpture rather than to scale model design as a pre-production tool.

2 Topos referring to Famagusta, is used here in a two-fold understanding of a literary topic relating to notions of contested spaces and a physical space ‘τόπος’ which is the Ancient Greek word for ‘place’.

3 The Cyprus National participation in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions PQ23 was represented by the Cyprus Theatre Organisation (THOC). Curator-initial concept: Marina Maleni; artistic research and art installation designer: Melita Couta; video performance artists: Melita Couta and Pascal Caron; collaborating technical advisor: Harris Kafkarides; audiovisual technology: Giorgos Lazoglou.

4 The project ‘EMERGENCE. From shared experience to new creativity. Living Heritage/Reframing Memory’ was a four-year (2018–2021) collaboration between eight major art institutions, supported by the Creative Europe Programme. The workshop ‘Boundaries, Walls, or Impositions’ took place in Cyprus 2019, with Marina Maleni as the workshop coordinator and dramaturg.

5 The ‘STATE’ was a collaborative art installation relying on spectator engagement, proposing the formation of a 24-hour independent microstate and its dissolution. The installation was set up within the buffer zone, in Nicosia, in a United Nations-controlled area as a miniature of a social space within a politically charged terrain. It was ‘activated’ by a group of artists who engaged with the visitors through a series of actions, associated to state operations. The work was a comment on the site specificity of the buffer zone as a miniature of a territory of resistance belonging neither here or there.

6 The term genius loci refers to the prevailing character and distinctive atmosphere of the city of Famagusta. Reflecting on the PQ23 theme RARE, it also suggests the uniqueness and singularity of the place as a rare city in the world.

7 The UN Security Council Resolution 550 was voted on the 11th May 1984. The resolution was adopted by 13 votes to one against (Pakistan) and one abstention from the United States.

8 Dark Tourist is a New Zealand documentary series about the phenomenon of dark tourism, presented by journalist David Farrier. The series was released by Netflix in July 2018. Famagusta is featured in Season 1, Episode 5 ‘Europe’.

9 Famagusta New Museum (FNM), initiated by Yiannis Toumazis in 2016, is an active platform, which proposes a restart of the ghost city of Varosha by readdressing the traditional role of museums in contemporary societies. https://famagustanewmuseum.com

10 Hands-on Famagusta web platform is devoted to visualising a common urban future for a unified Famagusta. It is based on the on-going work by the Laboratory of Urbanism, University of Cyprus (LU2CY), Imaginary Famagusta (I.F.), and ALA/Stratis. http://www.handsonfamagusta.org

11 Anna Marangou is an archaeologist, art historian, writer and curator, founder of Historic Cyprus. Marangou is organising walking tours around places of historic and cultural significance in Cyprus such as Famagusta. https://www.historiccyprus.com

12 The Famagusta Ecocity project was co founded and directed by Vasia Markides, which envisions Famagusta as a sustainable, environmentally responsible city.

13 On 29 May 2023, Storror Pro Parkour Team posted on their YouTube channel a 15 minute video titled ‘Parkour in SNAKE Infested WARZONE’. It shows members of the team performing parkour stunts in the enclosed city of Famagusta, unaware of the city’s history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = TbJVW2e5U5g