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Screen Recording 2020-11-20 at 1.59.44 PM
video, 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT
The town of Varosi, or Varosha, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, was fenced off by the Turkish military for 46 years. Since the Greek-backed coup d’etat and Turkish invasion of 1974 that divided Cyprus into a Greek Cypriot-controlled south and Turkish Cypriot-controlled north, Varosi was neither settled nor demolished. The erstwhile bustling seaside town, replete with modernist architecture and miles of sandy beaches, was left to the elements, slowly turning into a shell of itself, earning the name of “ghost town.”
In 2006, a Turkish Cypriot friend of the artist’s maternal uncle entered the town undetected, and recovered an old exercise book from the family’s ancestral home. It was a diary of the artist’s mother, from the time she was eight years old, featuring colored pencil drawings with each entry. The diary was the closest the artist ever came to witnessing what her mother’s life was like before the war. When the Turkish military opened Varosi to the public in October 2020—in a move denounced by the UN and the international community as illegal—the artist and her mother visited the town together for the first time. A few weeks later, the artist returned to her home in New York.
BIO
ARGYRO NICOLAOU (@slvr_rg, www.anicolaou.com) is a Cypriot writer and filmmaker based in NYC. Her short films have screened at festivals in Europe and the US (POFF Shorts, Lemesos Int’l Documentary Festival, Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, DC Shorts Fest), while she has also curated and participated in film and visual arts programming in New York, Athens and Cyprus (Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival, Gallatin Galleries NYU, space52, The Island Club). Argyro got her PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice from Harvard in 2018, where she also received the Bowdoin Prize, Harvard’s most prestigious writing award. In 2018-2019 she worked as a curatorial researcher at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the Department of Media and Performance, and has since taught film studies, literature and cultural history courses at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She is one of two Artistic Directors for Cyprus Film Days International Film Festival 2023.
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