WORKSHOP

Eco Art Incubator Cyprus: Sites Embodied

14th-19th April 2017

Part of the Sites Embodied Cyprus festival

This Eco Art Incubator brought together local and visiting artists from various disciplines to research ecological art methodologies as they pertain to a particular contested site. These artists shared their expertise and use site-specific embodied research to respond to this site in order to generate new artistic and ecological resonances. The intent was for artists to experiment with their own practice through a thematic lens and to seed practices for on-going engagements in this region.

This work was done in dialogue with co-facilitators Denise kenney and Nancy Holmes (artists and professors at University of British Columbia, Canada). http://blogs.ubc.ca/theecoartincubator

The purpose of this 6-day workshop was to expand the participating artists’ own artistic ways of knowing by collaborating with the tangible and intangible web of sensory, spiritual, cultural, historical, ecological and economic complexities of Androlikou, a small village in the Akamas Peninsula.

This village, greatly depopulated after the Cyprus invasion of 1974, is home to a few inhabitants who live alongside ghostly abandoned stone houses. The village contains the abandoned temporary refuge ruined home of Cypriot poet Tefkos Anthias; a large quarry that visually dominates the panoramic view; rich red clay banks scooped out for pottery-making; a Turkish Cypriot graveyard which is featured in the film Akamas, the love story of a bicommunal marriage by director Panicos Chrysanthou; rock-strewn agricultural fields with old fig and orange trees bordered by stone walls and villagers’s homes; deep gorges rich in biodivesity; and stunning views of the Mediterranean sea. 50% of the Akamas Peninsula surface is part of the European Natura 2000 sites network regarding the protection of its species and habitants. Some areas are under pressure to touristic building development. At the same time Akamas Project Director under the Environmental Department and in collaboration with the local village communites, has developed an Action Plan for Sustainable Development of the Peninsula, which is currently in the process of implementation. Androlikou’s plans is for the development of organic gardening demonstrations, natural building education, developing a small scale multi-cultural center in an abandoned warehouse, the restoration of the traditional character of the village, the protection and the development of nature trains in the gorges, as well for re-conversion of the former Tefkros Antias refuge into a Centre for Peace and Intercultural Cooperation.

This workshop intended to support these aspirations.

Participants have spent most of the time in the village learning about the place and being given access to various creation resources. The conceptual lens of “Earth” informed the work as this is the element that emerges strongly from the village’s conflicts around land use, its ecological and agricultural issues and the dominance of stone and soil in the politics and ecology of this place.

The Eco Art Incubator Cyprus: Sites Embodied workshop intended to do the following:

• To bring artist together in a retreat-like setting to develop an international network of ecological art practices and practitioners.
• To explore how artistic practices can disrupt intransigent cognifive frames.
• To focus on embodied practices for the creation of ecological art.
• To support on-going projects in the region.
• To respond to a complex, contested, inspirational place fraught with social, cultural and ecological anxietites.
• To witness and acknowledge these anxieties, not to offer to solve or remediate them.
• To work together and create art that acknowledges that the quality of our approach and our commitment to life-enhancing relationships between humans and the more than human world.

The workshop Eco Art Incubator Cyprus: Sites Embodied is organized by Dance Gate Lefkosia Cyprus in collaboration with the Creative Europe Desk Cyprus and supported by DanceHouse Lefkosia.

Photographs of Akamas by ERGENC KORKMAZEL