“Chose a spot anywhere near the coast of Cyprus and face either direction. On one side there is the sea, endless in space and time; on the other the mainland. Start walking and record what you see, the hotels, the villas, the ancient ruins, the churches, the satellite dishes, the military installations, the billboards, the pollution, the airports, the factories, the fields, the damns, the farms, the golf clubs, the harbours, the castles, the highways. Each spot seems to lie in a spatial/temporal context which is incongruent; all these elements are related horizontally but not vertically. The speed of change, their anarchic, disparate genesis will not allow a historical link to be established, they are free-floating in a sea of different signs. The liquidity of this landscape can now be within an anthropocentric time scale. It is clear as cables, electricity, communication networks [visible or not] prevail, that we are entering a more immaterial state, a gaseous state as Georges Serres would say. There is a shift in the strategic importance of the island from a military and naval outpost, to a communication and spying knot, and land itself becomes a commodity, speculated upon by developers, investors and the traditional owners themselves, who see it as transitory income rather capital. This is the creation of a new rootless condition, of people who used to be attached to their land, but now see their basic premise dissolving into a new locus, outside the hard core of their existence, the new self displaced.”
