Nicosia Water Tanks
Nicosia Water Tanks is a project on the water systems of divided Nicosia, Cyprus. The project was inaugurated as a proposal for the unrealized “manifesta” in Cyprus, submitted then as a common work with the photographer Armin Linke. Some photographs were chosen from different existing archives, swimming pool companies, newspapers images or pictures by Aristide Antonas. The pictures refer to finds of the water system. They can be read as showing archaeological finds. Some descriptions will be added. The work is presented as a local displaced reading of a Bruno Latour's text about Paris.
The work can be described as a “creation of finds”. It ends up to a construction of a vast archive or a collection. The selection or the installation of a collection does not really takes into consideration the particular, chosen pieces but the space formed by their interval. The void in between the collection pieces is more significant than any piece of the collection itself. What is interesting thus in such collections or archives is not the fragmented captures taken out of a so-called continuous process. On the contrary, the fragmented character is intrinsic for the works. The fragmented character anticipates any research methodology. A glorification of it is under preparation in this particular accumulation. Furthermore this creation of a specific void in the center of a field is the only possible target, still vague, defined by its eventual character. The construction of finds creates their in between space. The mere fact that a void is finally installed there is neither not important. It is the shape of this void that we try to describe.
The creation of finds is a work that transubstantiates unimportant pieces to simulacra of research remains. Unimportant insignificant fragments are shown as remarkable particles of an invisible unified network of a divided city. This series of documents and representation pieces is proved more complicated than a series of fragments collected from a “real” coherent research. It seeks a reading and the question of a collection's origin installs what could be called “aesthetic dimension” of the work. This transubstantiation of the pieces to a collection is a work of art, but also this passage from the fragments to a collection is the way we can think about philosophy or theory today: we remember the Benjamin description of his work as a collection of text’s fragments put in line and elaborated on the articulations that rule their connections. Furthermore there is a quest for the meaning of piled, heap constructions today. For this reason the transubstantiation does not allow in these works any idealization of a collected piece. The finds are created as finds not to be honored as important documents detached from an unimportant mass but in order to shape a space that could also be created through the use of different material. There is a void that is shaped, the in between space of the created finds that is important, not the material per se.
Nicosia, 2007-2008
In collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni and Elina Axioti