MESAORIA / MESARYA – Land between mountains

Paper presented at: Learning with Mountains: Recalibrating how we understand art and planet Conference in Cyprus (Nicosia and Kapedes), 6-8 February 2025 ABSTRACT For a period of 4 years, pre-Covid, Susan Brind & Jim Harold developed projects in Agios Sozomenos, Potamia (Republic of Cyprus) and Tymvou / Kirklar (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), considering the complex histories evident in the landscape. Linking those places, they traced the route of the Gialias river, following its dry bed into and across the Mesaoria plain. It proved a richly layered environment in which to think beyond its recent past to an ancient time: to think about the landscape as archive; and how readings of such landscapes sit within a geological timespan that is beyond our full comprehension, with an ecology possibly ambivalent to our presence. Consequently Brind & Harold have become interested in questioning how art can be utilised to draw attention to a rhizomatic, interconnected plane of being. Methods include uncovering knowledge through books, maps and archives but, most importantly, fieldwork to experience locations first hand in order to develop a relation with site and place through what is observed and what is experienced. In combination they have come to understand place not as a fixed edifice but in a state of flux or becoming: an emerging palimpsest of readings, experiences, events and timescales. Using the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories’ strategy of ‘Nomadic Dialogues’ (in contexts such as this) as a method and an outcome; as an artistic means to be creatively proactive in the articulation of new narratives for place making, place meaning and belonging. This paper includes a performative reading and makes reference to two site-specific works created in response to the areas of Agios Sozomenos, Potamia, Tymvou and the Gialias River. It centres on humans’ entangled relationship with nature in shaping those places in the past and in the present. Re-focusing in this way, the works explore different layers of time in order to read the places and landscapes in an ecological, political and phenomenological way, so that the narrative held within the landscape is neither linear nor reductive, but is itself entangled (Timothy Morton) and we, too, are entangled within it (Karen Bard). Not separate from but part of that nature, that history, those landscapes, those places.