While visiting the Venice Architecture Biennale last month, I had taken the decision not to write anything that was connected to Cyprus’ participation because a relative had been part of the exhibition’s team.
I resisted even though having walked through the beautifully curated pavilions of Denmark, Canada, Spain and Germany, it was clear that the small and almost out-of-sight Cyprus pavilion had managed to address – less glamorously but far more substantively – the Biennale’s main theme: How, in the climate crisis, architecture needed to adapt and draw on multiple forms of intelligence: natural, artificial, and collective.
Never mind I thought; it was enough that those who visited the Cypriot pavilion, including the Cypriot deputy minister of culture, Vasiliki Kassianidou, were able to appreciate how relevant and how comprehensive in its messaging Cyprus’ participation was.
A thesis that explored how the communal construction of drystone walls in the village of Salamiou in western Cyprus reflected the architectural mentality that is now desperately required in the climate crisis age1. A return to the functionalism of the rural mindset, the connection to the land and the community. A far cry from the Limassol skyscraper glitz and the abuse inflicted of the land and the climate by the country’s now dominant development model.
Never mind that while condemned to draw a minority audience, the artists, writers and curators, guided by a dedicated architect and cultural heritage researcher, Sevina Floridou, explored the social and political repercussions of an indigenous architecture and delivered a profoundly relevant argument while showcasing the toil and inventiveness of Cyprus’ people. Never mind that they highlighted how late-industrialism fractured the land and communities through value extraction, but also how war, colonialism and ecocidal violence displaced people and affected the landscape. Never mind that they succeeded in capturing the values of old-Cyprus, those rooted in community labour, values worth defending and revisiting; I still wouldn’t write about it.
Then, out of nowhere, a Cypriot parliamentarian, Pavlos Mylonas, the chairman of the House Committee on Education, went on a beautifully curated populist rage criticizing the language and some of the terminology used in the book that accompanied Cyprus’ exhibition. He lifted a copy in the studio air of prime-time news shows and demanded that the ministry of culture withdraw it from circulation. He claimed that the language and some of the terms used by the contributors in reference to the 1974 events in Cyprus were inaccurate and unacceptable. How could the ministry of culture, he asked, fund a project that used terminology that went contrary to the official narrative? The national cause was suddenly at risk.
As the Cypriot exhibitors and drystone craftspeople sought to address architecture’s capacity to draw on nature’s intelligence and on the notion of collective intelligence, they underestimated the perennially shallow intelligence of their politicians, the key driver of the cult of Cypriot nationalist populism and the key builder of the walls of division.
Grown men were threatened by the absence of the official terminology and offended by words that on close inspection they had, in fact, mostly misinterpreted. Some deliberately, by exaggerating and addressing them out of context, others as a genuine side-effect of their chronic condition. The ensuing nationalist social media frenzy heightened the call for the withdrawal of the publication.
And then, the ministry obliged; with supersonic speed. A sharp warning to artists and writers receiving public funds to pay a visit to the state’s press office for a ‘briefing’ before exhibiting or publishing. Presumably a convoy of gondolas was mobilized in Venice to move the books somewhere isolated before further harm could be inflicted.
One suspects that the minister, a respected and soft spoken academic, a professor of Archaeology at the University of Cyprus, would have felt insulted being told off by a marginal populist politician. One expects that she would have felt a tingle of embarrassment for not defending the right of free artistic and academic expression. But few would have expected her to kowtow to a populist politician with such unexamined haste after she had herself visited the Biennale and congratulated the team for its work.
The reasons the withdrawal was demanded, she claimed later, were not political but legal and focused on the fact that the ministry was recorded as co-publisher when it had not approved the content. Cheap, unbecoming and definitely self-defeating.
The incident exposes the timid reflexes of the political class -in this case its educated and educating class. It was blatantly obvious that the minister’s instincts are trained not at defending points of principle but at not upsetting the nation’s principal, the nationalist class. On closer inspection, not upsetting her political master’s fragile balances as he panders shamelessly to the far-right ahead of a second presidential term.
Not unlike the professor of Law at the University of Cyprus whose department includes a module on the workings of the International Courts system, who, once turned minister had no qualms visiting an International Criminal Court-indicted politician in Israel2, a professor of Archaeology turned minister of culture succumbed to censoring creative content.
It’s a depressing confirmation of the shadiness and hypocrisy that governs Cypriot public life. A silent disorder affecting the country’s collective capacity to act with integrity and conviction. More menacingly, a disorder which has blinded it to the far right flotilla rowing unobstructed into the mainstream.
2. https://nicholaskaridesessays.substack.com/p/academic-suicides
Nicholas Karides 