Liquid Landscapes: Water Tunnels, Flamingos, and Radar Sounds in Contemporary Photography From Cyprus

Through a decolonial lens, and using Cyprus as a case study, the paper examines how contemporary photography and artistic practices can play a pivotal role in re-making islands by reclaiming alternative local perspectives. In doing so, such practices challenge existing hierarchies of meaning, unsettle dominant historic narratives and representations, and reassess meaning from within . The work of Cyprus-born and -based photographer Stelios Kallinikou is further examined, especially his decade long investigation of the Akrotiri Peninsula, a site of archaeological, geological, and historical significance, and an example of a space where colonialism and settlement have shifted the landscape and its water ecologies. The paper adopts the terms (diss)assemblage and ‘trope’ –meaning a turn, a change, a direction – to discuss the processes of making and unmaking islands (the trope of the island), especially through the production of the photographic image (the trope of the photograph), historically by the imperial gaze, and in the present by a contemproary artist whose work reframes landscapes both physical and imaginative. The discussion also unearths how both dominant and dormant narratives continue to impact on and shape a sense of islandness that remains negotiated and in constant flux.