STITCHING THE BUFFER ZONE

Description

Stitching the Buffer Zone. Landscapes, Sounds and Trans_Experiences along the Cyprus Green Line.

Stitching the Buffer Zone is a collective initiative which aims to build up an open platform of interaction and exchange on the issue of the Cyprus Buffer Zone. By means of exhibitions, presentations, and/or public interventions, in Cyprus and abroad, Stitching the Buffer Zone is an ongoing open call to artists, activists, architects, urban planners, and researchers to question, reformulate and contest prevailling norms and ideologies concerning this spatial strip which is still exluded from everyday experience. In doing so, these events and collaborations aim to shift perspective, and, thus, to create new meanings, experiences, understandings, relationships and situations. Territories are but fear of space is the first exhibition presented by Stitching the Buffer Zone. This exhibition brings together 4 women architects and urban planners. Their work grows out of a critical belief that histories of segreggation produce territories of exclusion. Their approaches suggest processes of transformation of the buffer zone from such a territory to a space of multiple encounters. In their own words:

Contents of Book and Exhibition:

• Project 1: The GreenLineScapes Laboratory seeks to initiate healing ecologies in the physical and psychological rift of the Cyprus Buffer Zone – where the untamed forces of Nature have engendered a spontaneous process of cicatrisation – and suggests the opportunity to create a beautiful scar through the creation of an ecological landscape of memory. [Anna Grichting Solder]
• Project 2: The Stitches – Connecting the two Nicosias again proposes a functional stitch aiming at recreating the broken threads of the City. becomes a tool in urban context, promoting revival through encounter. Creating common experience aims at surpassing this zone of prohibition, remaining in space not only as an urban gap but also a gap in the memory of the city. It aims at challenging more stitches to occur. [Maria Costi de Castrillo]
• Project 3: Trans_experiences aim to invent mechanisms that transfer the experience of the buffer zone in to a real space, in order to redefine the perception of the boundary and to generate new spatial connections and transmutations. Through transient interventions, different elements are assimilated, intermingled and transformed, leading to a new ‘crossing experience‘. [Stephanie Keszi & Georgia Frangoudi]

191 pages / 20 x 20 cm / English