A Land Rover Approached The Village - Neoterismoi Toumazou
Essay commissioned by Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, for the exhibition Terra Mediterranea: In Action (2017). A translated version into Greek appears in Marina Kassianidou, When Words Enter the Picture, Visual Artists Association Cyprus:Nicosia, 2017, pp. 173-174 (ISBN: 978-9963-2165-2-9)
In the installation A Land Rover Approached the Village (Black Rainbow) (2017), Neoterismoi Toumazou turn their attention to the aesthetic grammar of ruins; a grammar that articulates both ‘sense impressions of what is supposed to have happened and sense impressions of what has not yet happened’ 1, investigating contemporary cultural consciousness as a multidimensional formation, permeated by subjectivation ows and as cartographic of the intermingling loops of memory and desire.
Exploring the deserted village of Ayios Sozomenos, near the Green Line, which is now used by an electronic music community, as a heterotopia of deviancy2 –a place that is seemingly on the margin of normative cultural processes, cut o from the regulatory ow of everydayness and without predetermined residents, where, however, a di erentiation is articulated– they install at the exhibition space a copy of the ruins of the church of Ayios Mamas, a gure standing in a gangplank position and an installation of light boxes.
The installation is built upon the team’s examination of the expressive capacities of materials: ruins built from Styrofoam and covered with clay, a sculpture taking an anthropomorphic cue due to limps dressed in plastic, light entering the scene from light-boxes arranged in an abstract, uid composition. Through the tactics of displacing-destabilising copying, faithful to the scale of the destroyed original, with arti cial light that creates a colour eld and envelops the visitor and with fashion imagery, that imbues the work’s emphasis on site and situation with a “...pragmatist practice of onto-aesthetics”3, they create and utilise an alternative and immersive exhibition/gathering space.
1 Bion, W. (1967) Notes on Memory and Desire, The Psychoanalytic Forum 2, pp. 272-3. 2 The term originates from Michel Foucault’s essay, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, that was published in the Archi- tecture/Mouvement/Continuité magazine, in October 1984. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (01.11.2017) 3 Bahtsetzis S., with images by Karakepelis C. (2017) From Logocular Anthropotechnics to Posthuman Dispositives: Toward a Manifesto of the Postdiscursive Era, South as a State of Mind #8 [documenta 14 #3], documenta and Museum Fridericianum. https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/901_from_logocular_anthropotechnics_to_posthuman_dispositives_toward_a_manifesto_of_the_postdiscursive_era (23.01.2020)