The architecture exhibition as a stage of mediated narratives

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the role and agency of the architecture exhibition as a mediated space of discursive spatial narratives. The presented curatorial approach draws on the exhibition entitled Past-forward: Stavros Economou Unarchived (2021) to reflect on the development of a multimedia-enabled reading of the architectural archive. Stavros Economou is one of the most important representatives of modern architecture in Cyprus, yet his work is underdiscussed and under-published. The architectural archive, unlike other collections, consists of representations (such as drawings, models, photographs) of artefacts (buildings) that communicate design processes and final un/built proposals. The curatorial practice focused on a twofold challenge: on one hand, it explored the role architectural representation can play in the production of the multiple and complex (hi)stories of modern buildings, and secondly, it considered ways in which an architecture exhibition can connect with the host city and its local population by addressing contemporary urgencies of spatial inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture exhibition
• curatorial practice
• modern architecture heritage
• digital media
• architectural archive

1. Introduction

This paper discusses the role and the performative agency of the architecture exhibition as a stage of mediated narratives that is triggered with the activation and the ‘making public’ of a private architectural archive. It explores how an architecture exhibition can become a discursive site of knowledge production that challenges dominant narratives, by reflecting on the curatorial positioning and multimedia reconstruction of the archive through the project Past-forward: Stavros Economou Unarchived.¹ This was the first retrospective exhibition of the work of Stavros Economou (1917–2004) – one of the most significant representatives of Modern Architecture in Cyprus. The exhibition was hosted, between June and October 2021, at the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, a building designed by Economou for Nicosia’s Supply Cooperative Company in 1965. The curatorial approach addressed a twofold challenge: on one hand, it explored the role architectural representation can play in the production of the multiple and complex (hi)stories of modern buildings by focusing on the way digital tools and methods can be used to creatively engage with the architectural archive, and secondly, it considered ways in which an architecture exhibition can connect with the host city and its local population by addressing contemporary urgencies of spatial inquiry that provide new readings of the archive and its present-day value beyond heritage and historical research.

Economou’s archive offers a rich ground for such inquiries as his projects were pioneering at the time and remain relevant today, as they address challenges that the built environment of Cypriot cities is still facing. Additionally, his work remains largely underdiscussed and under-published compared to his contemporaries and the exhibition aimed at bringing light to this important practice, distinguished by a strong social vision, that contributed to the shaping of the Cypriot urban landscape and to the spatial and social transformations of the country during the first post-colonial decades. Notably, his work includes several important landmarks in Cyprus’ major cities (Docomomo 2014).

Cypriot Modernism has been discussed largely in the context of the sociopolitical transformations that the island underwent during the transition of its administration from a British colony to a sovereign country and the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus (Georghiou 2013). Existing discourse focuses mainly on the politics of the introduction of the new architectural vocabulary, its embracement by local architects at the time and its impact in sectors of the society, including urban planning, tourism, housing models, and the modernization processes of the island (Bozdoğan, Pyla, and Petros 2022; Fereos and Phokaides 2006; Phokaides and Chronaki 2016; Sioulas and Pyla 2018). One of the objectives of the research presented is to add to this historiographic literature new knowledge drawn from Economou’s archive. Specifically, this research through a multimedia approach aims at reading Economou’s archive to highlight unknown dimensions from the architect’s design practice that enable reflections on the island’s current condition and challenges, and contribute to discourse about the social role of the architect. The paper argues that this transmedia approach, developed through the presented exhibition, contributes to the discourse on creative curation of exhibitions about architectural archives.

2. Materials and methods

2.1. The architectural archive

The exhibition’s scope was to make-public Economou’s private archive by making historical information, which is at large inaccessible, hidden and unknown, physically present to a diverse audience. The architectural archive was treated as a source of visual knowledge that constitutes part of our cultural heritage and which can potentially allow for the enactment of collective memories, untold stories and new readings for our cities’ past, present and futures. Removed from its assigned, dusted storage space, the archive was spatially organized into the gallery, highlighting its importance as ‘found images’, or ‘found objects’ that challenge the already known. The engagement and research conducted in three archives; Stavros Economou private archive (which was the main resource), The State Archives and the Press and Information Office, posed questions that concerned the nature of the architectural archive that formed the curatorial methods pursued.

The creation of an archive is bound to decision processes of inclusion and exclusion from those in authority, as well as to issues of accessibility. Archives constitute accumulative knowledge from where histories are written or erased, subjects are included or excluded, events are highlighted or concealed. The architectural archive, unlike other archives or collections, consists of representations (such as drawings, models, photographs, reports) of artefacts (buildings) that capture and communicate intentions, design processes, instructions and final un/built proposals. The relation between an artefact and its representation is discussed by Nelson Goodman, who distinguishes between two different types of art forms. Stan Allen in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation explains that Goodman ‘calls autographic those arts, like painting and sculpture, that depend for their authenticity upon the direct contact with the author’ (Allen 2000, 33). In contrast, ‘allographic arts are those capable of being reproduced at a distance from the author by means of notation. Allographic arts operate through interpretation and in the basis of convention. They are subject to changing standards of performance’ (Allen 2000, 34). Framing architecture as an allographic practice, means identifying a gap between a building and its representation challenging architecture’s autonomy and authorship, and acknowledging architecture’s dependance on multiple external and uncontrollable factors that perform its spaces, experiences, memories and (hi)stories. Architecture as an allographic practice acknowledges human action and experience, the event and time as active participants of spatial meaning.

Given the specific nature of the architectural archive, the question is how the partial nature of architectural representation impacts our understanding of a building and its multiple and complex histories? The overlapping realities between the built environment and human activity raise questions concerning the separation of the built from the lived, of representation from spatial experience, and of the object from the subject. Buildings, unlike static objects, get inhabited and constantly transform in time. Often, they also get abandoned and demolished. This durational understanding of the life of buildings, is absent from the archive where the architect’s viewpoint is foregrounded, due to the traditional architectural representational material and the common architectural practices. Usually, an architect’s engagement with a building begins with the commission of a project and ends with its construction. Re-visiting buildings after their construction to document, trace and reconstruct their transformation in time, is a tool for actively engaging with the temporality of places, their appropriation and their users. Drawings, photographs and models depict buildings as snapshot images of a past time. This is reinforced by the Modernist understanding of building as a singular finished edifice, ‘a machine for living in’, designed by the architect to respond to specific needs of a specific time. These aspects, result in the so-called ‘heritage buildings to be treated as finished entities, which can be artificially separated from the present’ (Goffi 2016, 5).²

An appropriate use of media and visual methodologies can provide alternatives of reconstructing archival material through creative spatial practices that foreground the temporalities of buildings. The curatorial methods pursued after the study of the archives, focused on the exploration of media that would enable the creative reconstruction of buildings’ life cycles. This multimedia approach aimed to uncover narratives missing from the archive, expanding its content with new visual knowledge through digital media and storytelling. This was explored by relying on the opportunities currently offered by digital technologies to (re)mediate multi-layered spatial narratives, as well as to study how this mediated immersion to digital and virtual reconstructions can enrich and expand our understanding of heritage buildings. These new understandings aimed at enabling new methods, strategies, policies and designs for our contemporary cities.

2.2. Contemporaneity of the archive

In a broader context, the projects presented at the exhibition (Figure 1) were selected from the archive due to their relevance to contemporary challenges in regard to architecture and city-related issues of Cyprus. Economou designed a large number of public and private projects, both as a Municipal Architect of the Famagusta Municipality (1952-55), as well as after he established his own firm in 1960.

Figure 1. View of the exhibition’s ground floor and first floor. Photograph by Valia Matsentidou.

In regards to his public projects, his work highlights significant past efforts to offer new opportunities for appropriating and democratizing urban space which, in Cyprus, is constantly under threat by building speculation and opportunistic development (Nicosia Master Plan Office 2004). The projects remain relevant today, as they address challenges of the built environment of Cypriot cities, such as the protection of the coastal front, the relationship of the city with its historical centre and the Venetian walls of Nicosia, public infrastructure, well-being and communal living. In regards to private development, Economou’s work raises questions about social housing, the sprawling growth of urban space, driven by private initiative without long-term and integrated planning, the pressures of mass tourism on the landscape and built environment of coastal cities. All these spatial phenomena evident in studying the archival material are reflected in challenges our cities face today. The thematics of the exhibition were created in the logic of temporal intersections between past and present to raise public awareness about the historical context of the many buildings and public spaces the architect designed, during these formative years of Cyprus and to engage its visitors into discussions about the future of Cypriot cities and the re-appropriation of modern architecture that constitutes a significant part of the island’s building stock. In this sense, the archival material was curated as 'the site of knowledge in which to rehearse its crises' (Rogoff and Martinon 2013, 17) rather than as enactments of architecture representation.

To better communicate the relevance of the modern architecture heritage of Cypriot cities to the contemporary challenges these are facing, an interpretative process of selecting, filtering and organizing the material into a number of thematic clusters was employed. The curatorial criteria of this process emerged from the archival content and the multiple fragmented narratives it presents, while each of these clusters reflect specific social and environmental issues of the built environment. The overarching goal of this taxonomy of works from the archive was to link these localized issues of Cypriot cities with current discourse in the broader region of Eastern Mediterranean (Sabatino and Lejeune 2010). Specifically, the exhibition was organized around three broader thematic areas, and their subsections, each occupying a separate floor as follows starting from the ground level up:

Public Discourse

Public Space

Designing for the Public

Government Buildings

The Life of Buildings

Urban Development

Views from the Interior

Polykatoikia

The School as a City

2.3. ‘Play object’: the archive cabinet

Each thematic was punctuated by an ‘Archive Cabinet’, a display device, which spatially organized the content of the exhibition (Figure 2). These constructions were conceived as interior furniture in the spirit of the cabinets of curiosity, a pre-modern museum display device addressing curatorial aims. Each Archive Cabinet was specifically designed to accommodate the material of a thematic, that spilled out to its adjacent walls. In a variety of sizes, consisting of multiple drawers, the Archive Cabinets became display devices of important historical information and drawings. They were created to enhance the exploration and the quality of discovery of the curated material rather than presented solely as display objects. The design of these cabinets was inspired from the archive which was treated as a design resource, presenting the multiple uses it entails and the diverse audience it may interest. Based on a catalogue created, consisting with a collection of interior furniture and other architectural elements from Economou’s work and buildings, the design of the cabinets developed by transcribing elements and ideas from the archive (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Archive Cabinets displaying original material from Economou’s private archive to be discovered by the visitor of the exhibition.

Figure 3. Catalogue of archival material of interior furniture and other architectural elements from Economou’s work and buildings that informed the design of the Archive Cabinets.

The Archive Cabinets were designed to provoke the curiosity of the visitors to interact with them, fostering the quality of discovery, play and exploration with the archival material. Also, these cabinets reversed the reality of archival spaces, where hundreds of documents fill up its drawers. The archive cabinets, like the cabinets of curiosities display ‘rare’ and important ‘found images and objects’ that call for interpretation and problematization of the thematics displayed. The Archive Cabinets provoke the participation of the visitor, aiming at creating new relations between the visitor, the exhibits and the curator into new roles that shift the visitor from a passive onlooker to an active participant. As mediating devices between an artefact and the visitor, the archive cabinets, call for interaction and attentive observation that provoke the visitor to take up the role of the researcher who observes, reads, discovers and ultimately draws new connections amongst the archival material juxtaposed. The display and organization of the exhibition material in the cabinets aimed at ‘speaking’ to diverse publics both expert and non-expert audience by implementing diverse media that are not bound to the coded system of architectural drawings, such as photographs, articles, films and interviews (Figure 4).

Figure 4. A multimedia approach was used to offer to the public new readings of the architectural archive, including films and video interviews.

2.4. Stories

Central role to the curation of the content that was exhibited, played the authors’ approach to state-of-the-art methods of visitors’ engagement with the archive (Lester 2022). Storytelling was used as a mechanism of connecting threads of narratives among the archival assets to offer the visitors new opportunities for reflecting on the cultural values of the architecture presented in the exhibition. To do so, the visitors engaged with assemblages of relevant ‘stories’ about specific buildings that were presented by means of a series of dynamic reconstructions of architecture through the creative Photographic Documentation of space, Crowdsourcing campaigns, Interviews, short Architecture Films and Virtual Reality (VR) tools. For example, crowdsourcing was used as a strategy of collecting and feeding the ‘formal’ archives with ‘other’ voices/subjects’ views, and experiences of presented buildings. To do so, the public was asked to share photographic material of experiences and memories from Economou’s buildings and the associated public spaces, wherein different individual activities and events took place.

The authors’ aim was to communicate to the public the coexistence of different temporalities, experiences and atmospheres of these buildings, the memories of the individuals who appropriated them in an ad hoc manner, and transformed their designated functions and assigned meanings and the vast number of unused modern buildings that consist of the building block of our contemporary cities. Addressing what is missing from the collection of the architectural archive was an important aspect of the presented research, that aimed to enrich our understanding of the multiple temporalities of a building, its current state and value in order to speculate its future scenarios. In addition, through the creative and interpretive documentation of the life and abandonment of buildings through photography and film, the curatorial positioning highlights how a building’s multidimensional representation is an open-ended activity that re-writes its history and speculates its futures. Re-visiting buildings after their construction to trace their life cycles is a practice for actively engaging with the temporality of places, the complexities of their appropriation and the variety of their users that challenges the perception of building as a finished entity frozen in time (Figure 5).

Figure 5. The exhibition reflected on the current life, function and cultural associations of the inhabitants of the city with its forgotten architecture heritage and public buildings. Photographs of the Nicosia Municipal Market (left) and Wholesale Market (right), by Stefanos Kouratzis.

2.5. The affective archive: immersed in architecture’s digital surrogates

Significant effort of the research was devoted to the development of an immersive (VR) installation about an inaccessible but culturally important heritage asset from the archive that is in decay and in risk of destruction. It is acknowledged that VR can create a more engaging experience, one that enables the visitor to immerse in an event or place reconstruction, an experience that can lead to a deeper understanding of history than traditional exhibition approaches (Bucher 2017), contributing new learning experiences (Hamilton et al. 2020).

Presence through immersion refers to a feeling as if the visitor is ‘there’ in the projected environment of the building representation. Presence is characterized by the capacity of the participant to recall details of the 3D virtual environment rather than simply images of the digital reconstruction of a building (Slater 1999). This becomes possible by immersive technology that teleports the visitor in a digital surrogate of architecture contextualized in its surrounding environment, affording bodily interactions with the building, as well as experiencing duration (occupation patterns in time). This experience of the visitor facilitates learning about the building (Slater and Sanchez-Vives 2016). Better understanding historical information about a building supports learning by means of exploration and discovery of spatialized experiences that are provided to the visitor through auditory stimulation, proprioception by means of real-time movement in space through user input, stereoscopy and parallax with six degrees of freedom in movement (Barbieri et al. 2017; Kabassi et al. 2019).

The coded nature of architectural drawings limits the communication of the information that a non-expert audience can absorb (Diemer et al. 2015). VR is experimentally integrated in various exhibitions and museums today (Arthur 2018; Kang and Yang 2020), however a new approach was developed for the exhibition presented here to enhance visitors’ accessibility to archival material, their engagement with memories of the place reconstructed in the virtual environment to trigger a reflective process on its historical context. Bodily exploration of virtual environments is further motivated to last longer when immersive experiences are enriched with historical information (scanned archival material and old photographs crowdsourced from private collections). Providing historical context to the visitors of the virtual space through these digital assets, creates new opportunities for understanding spatial and formal qualities of the exhibited architecture, addressing questions of duration in architecture, as well as introducing other views/voices that are missing from an architectural archive that foregrounds the viewpoint of the architect. These neglected, informal views/voices constitute the architectural object in its holistic nature.

These new modes of engaging the visitors (Perry et al. 2017) were explored by reconstructing the sea-side recreation centre Alasia, which was named after the ancient city of Alasia (Engkomi) that was located near-by. The design and architectural programme of the building that was built in 1952 was very innovative, as it was designed to address the needs of both local communities and tourists. The building of Alasia is an example of heritage that relates to unsettling histories and memories (Macdonald 2008), as it is located in a controversial and sensitive site, in the militarized, UN-controlled buffer zone in Varoshia (see note 2). This is the infamous ghost city that still stands up, as a time shard from 1974 and the war.

The layering of an architectural reconstruction with personal accounts of the building’s history posed a big challenge to the curation of the information in the virtual space due to the difficult past of Varoshia (Michael 2020) (Figure 6). The virtual experience included personal accounts of the users of the building and how they appropriated it, stories about the everyday activities and events that were taking place in it. Curating material collected by the building’s users, who still hold recollections of it, through open-ended questions, helped the research to focus on events that capture and communicate significant aspects of the architecture, its environment and the building becoming a landmark for the public. Accommodating fragments of memories from a variety of users, of different demographics, was a first step to enriching the virtual reconstruction with feelings that rely on empathy (Kidd 2019; Poole 2018). The next step addressed the challenge of dealing with the building’s difficult past (Figure 7).

Figure 6. Immersive reconstruction, based on archival research, of the ‘seaside recreation centre Alasia, located in Varoshia, an example of inaccessible cultural heritage’.

Figure 7. Exploring the capacity of immersive environments for visitor engagement with the life of inaccessible heritage through audio-visual stimuli addressing empathy.

The VR experience aimed at bringing other voices to the fore that presents the building’s history from the bottom-up, counteracting the opinions of experts and professionals. These stories animated the virtual space of the building with what was missing – the people, the events, the birds, the wind and sea soundscapes (Hruby 2019). These memories relating to the life of the building provide insights that frame architecture from the perspective of its users. This is a new approach to (real)time-based media that contributed to the exhibition’s thematic ‘The Life of Buildings’.

This novel approach of the use of VR in exhibition spaces focuses on the creation of an immersive experience of inaccessible places in contested sites that is not only enriched with people’s personal stories, through the use of participatory heritage methodologies (Silverman 2011), but also offers to the visitors, new opportunities to explore spatialized reconstructions of the historical, cultural and environmental context of the building under study (Artopoulos, Louca, and Iacovou 2024). This immersive environment was introduced as a curatorial method in search for new modalities of affect and engagement with architectural knowledge that go beyond the observation of 2D drawings from the archive. Through the use of narrative-based mechanisms in immersive environments, the architecture exhibition allows visitors to virtually experience atmospheres of buildings from the archive that are unreachable otherwise. In this context, embodied exploration of virtual environments enriched with historical information provided to the visitors new learning opportunities for reflecting on the present-day relevance of the archive.

The research undertaken for the architecture exhibition was conducted through the interplay of archival material and fieldwork. The fieldwork concerned the production of new films, interviews, photographic documentation of the lives of buildings and the creation of an immersive experience of an inaccessible building.

2. Results: staging dialogue

The material displayed on the first and second floor of the exhibition, provided a source of curated information of ‘found images’ and ‘found objects’, as well as newly creative reproductions of images, drawings, films and objects that interpreted the archive. The curated information spread on the two floors of the gallery provided an important recourse for triggering current spatial and social urgencies of Cyprus that call for dialogue and action.

Framed by this intention, the ground floor of the exhibition was conceived to ‘stage dialogue’ triggered by the display material. Devoted to the thematic of the ‘Public Discourse’, the ground floor was designed to foster dialogue amongst diverse publics (Figure 8). This thematic was inspired by Stavros Economou’s active role in the public life of the country. He has been multivocal and expressed his architectural views and opinions in articles in local newspapers, international scientific journals and at conferences, as well as through the advisory committees and institutional bodies he chaired and participated in. Economou’s multifaceted practice was not limited to building but extended far beyond the strict bounds of the profession. Highlighting this aspect of his practice provided a ground for discussing the social role of the architect today.

Figure 8. The stage of dialogue that formed the ground floor of the exhibition hosted numerous public events and invited various communities to appropriate it and discuss about the pressing issues of our cities in the context of the thematics on display.

Significantly, the design of the stage structure that furnished the ground floor of the exhibition was based on a sketch found in the architect’s archive that he drew for a piece of display furniture originally to be installed in the building of SPEL, the State Gallery of Contemporary Art (Figure 9) hosting the exhibition. The reproduction of a piece of furniture designed for the same building re-performs the new space of the gallery and its new adopted function.

Figure 9. A sketch by Economou discovered in his private archive and illustrates a piece of display furniture originally designed for SPEL building. This archival material was used as a generative idea to create the stage design on the ground floor of the exhibition.

The aim was to transform the ground floor of the gallery into a public space for gathering and assembly that would provoke the participation and interaction of diverse publics into a series of curated events featuring guided tours, talks, roundtable discussions, film screenings and educational activities exploring a number of themes which arose from the content on show and which relate to the contemporary Cypriot city. During these public events visitors, professionals, scholars and non-expert groups of the community were engaged in dialogue communicating their feedback on the exhibition, while sharing their views on the topics it introduced. The authors accessed local knowledge through these events, which were documented as video recordings, expanding the conducted research. Topics covered in roundtable discussions consisted of ‘City, Citizens and Climate Crisis’, ‘Re-appropriating Modern Architecture’, ‘The Architectural Archive: Creative Practices of Documenting, Collecting, Displaying’, ‘Digital Tools and Practices of Engagement with Modern Architecture Heritage’ and ‘Women in Architecture’. Through these staged dialogues amongst the citizens, diverse local communities, professionals, academics and artists (locals as well as from the Eastern Mediterranean, Europe and the USA), the content of the curated material was discussed in relation to current environmental, spatial, political and social urgencies of the contemporary city.

This aim was motivated by current practices in de-custodial approaches to galleries and museum collections (Bastian 2002), where local communities and individuals are given the platform to share their views and participate in a collective formation of the exhibition results. Drawing on this, the authors applied this approach to expand and enrich public engagement methods with the architectural archive. In addition, reflecting on the role and agency of the architecture exhibition for social impact and spatial transformation, the curatorial methods focused on raising public awareness on city-related issues, by providing context that enabled the creation of a common ground for discussion for the futures of the city, the environment and social life. The participants of these events complemented the curatorial frameworks with new ideas, content and contributions 'modifying and generating meaning in acts of assembling in public' (Bismarck 2022, 14).

In addition, the exhibition expanded beyond the confined space of the gallery, creating a dialectic relationship between the curated architectural archive (the re-presented spaces) and the actual buildings/sites as they stand today in the Cypriot cities. Re-presenting, re-framing and re-contextualizing the seemingly known urban environment enabled the acquisition of new knowledge, the encounter with unknown spatial narratives, raising awareness about current urban challenges and ultimately a deeper connection between the citizens, the exhibition content and the host city.

3. Discussion

The paper presented the curatorial positioning and the multimedia methods pursued in order to activate Economou’s architectural archive and transform it into a locus of visual knowledge through which unheard narratives were uncovered, new affective experiences were reconstructed and dialogue amongst diverse publics was triggered. The curatorial methods focused on the productive dialogue between appropriate media in the representation of the life cycles of buildings, rendering architecture as an ‘allographic practice’. Approaching modern buildings through a durational sense of time re-frames them from static objects frozen in image-snapshots of a past time, to reusable, transformable objects of multiple temporalities. The multimedia approach to the archival display expanded the audience of the architecture exhibition and provided affective, immersive and multi-sensory experiences that triggered memories, discovered narratives and the imagination for the creative reconstruction of the (hi)stories of places.

Most importantly the strong digital component of the Past-Forward exhibition, as this resulted from the implementation of the above archival research and curatorial methods, enabled the creation of a ‘virtual twin’, that not only reconstructs the ephemeral exhibition hosted at SPEL gallery, but also creates a digital repository for the archive through an interactive interface that can be accessed remotely by a global audience. This ‘virtual twin’ was launched at the Kolektiv Cité Radieuse gallery at Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation, Marseille between May and July 2023. The virtual twin of the exhibition is functioning as a spatialized repository that can be continuously expanded in time. The research presented contributes to current discourse that promotes open access to collections and archives, and the creative use of digital media for enriching archives and enabling new interpretations of heritage by the public.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport and Youth – Cultural Services, with the support of the University of Cyprus, The Cyprus Institute.

Notes on contributors

Popi Iacovou

Popi Iacovou, Lecturer at the University of Cyprus, is an architect and academic investigating transdisciplinary models of thinking and practicing architecture. Her research explores the intersections between architecture, performance and the moving image. Her visual methodology focuses on filming as a spatial practice for the study and interpretation of cultural and socio-political architectural and urban phenomena. Her work has been published internationally and shown in film festivals and architecture exhibition venues such as the Melbourne Design Week, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Hong Kong and Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the International Thessaloniki Film Festival and others. She has curated architecture exhibitions for the London Festival of Architecture, the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, Nicosia, and Kolektiv Cité Radieuse, Marseilles. She received a PhD by Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She holds an MPhil on ‘Architecture and the Moving Image’ from the University of Cambridge funded by Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and a Diploma in Architecture from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has extensive teaching experience at institutions such as the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the University of Cambridge, Neapolis University and University of Nicosia.

Georgios Artopoulos

Georgios Artopoulos is an Associate Professor at the Cyprus Institute, where he works on immersive and virtual environments, urban modelling and digital simulation for the study of built heritage and the creative exploration of historical narratives. Georgios holds a Master of Philosophy and a PhD, University of Cambridge (UK) with a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together with the team of Virtual Environments Lab, at the CyI, Georgios is developing ICT-enabled user-driven tools for social resilience and inclusion, with an application in historical context. The social aspects of historic space and the cross-disciplinary nature of the pressing challenges facing our cities are explored through the externally funded projects he is contributing to or coordinating (under Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, ENI-CBC-MED, and the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation frameworks), his role as a co-Head of Virtual Competency Centre e-Infrastructure of the DARIAH ERIC, and as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of JPI Urban Europe, where he works on matters of sustainable and liveable cities and urban areas.

Notes

1 Iacovou, Popi, Artopoulos, George, Sioulas, Michalis, Christodoulidou, Marina, Past-forward: Stavros Economou Unarchived, at the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, 12 June–30 October 2021.

2 Varosha: “Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union,” Republic of Cyprus 2022, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Accessed August 22, 2021. https://mfa.gov.cy/press-releases/2021/07/27/eu-declaration-on-illegal-actions-of-turkey-in-varosha/#:~:text=The%20European%20Union%20strongly%20condemns,fenced%2Doff%20town%20of%20Varosha.