More about Studio 12

Jeanne Sillett, Andy Garton and Mark Rintoul

(re)adjusted territories : Cyprus double take(s)

We began with choreographed surveys in and beyond Nicosia, oscillating between North and South Cyprus across the ‘green line’.
Since 1974 the political act of partition has been manifest as a hastily erected and expedient physical partition … a soldier’s sketch constructed at 1:1 scale.
For older generations the memory of a complete island and a complete city are contradicted by this barrier, while younger people have only experienced one or other half as if the whole. Two realities have developed back to back, separated and joined by the third space of the UN patrolled buffer zone.

The current potential for re-unification seems an optimistic moment … and also a tangle of riddles and contrary perceptions engraved in a territory that was once one.
We imagined from afar the recent opening of border crossing points doubling the space … like a hall of distorting mirrors ... exposing similarities, differences, paradoxes and slippages.

Twenty people attempted a survey in October 2008 conceived as an island-sized choreography hinged on the crossing points.

The project intends a fresh way of seeing to match a fresh circumstance … setting out to observe whatever presents itself … equally interested in the famous, the beautiful, the ordinary and the mundane. The deliberate viewing of both sides of the line anticipates a harvest of double-takes … prompting a miscellany of questions … that might be re-phrased as speculations.