DeepNic

Contribute to a deeper understanding of our city by bringing your own photographs, documents, posters, newspaper clippings etc., at DeepNic’s scanning station at Home for Cooperation!

DeepNic: Deep Mapping Nicosia’s Urban Centre aims to investigate the evolution and transformation of Nicosia’s urban centre from a historical and sociological perspective using several types of data such as written, oral, and visual. It takes the whole of the urban centre of Nicosia as a case study, to examine how its transformation within a certain period is affected by key political and social developments that have occurred from 1960 until today, namely, the proclamation of the independence, the 1963-64 intercommunal strife, the 1974 war and the division of the island; the beginning of the Master Plan in 1979; the unilateral proclamation of TRNC in the north of Cyprus in 1983; first mass granting of employment permissions to immigrants in the 1990s; the opening of the crossings in 2003; the financial crisis in 2013; and the pandemic measures in 2020.

In this project, historical research is combined with geography and technology in a data visualization effort that allows a multi-temporal and multi-dimensional historical narrative. The method of deep mapping will be therefore applied, as it seems to offer the means to accomplish the objectives of this project, which are:

• Collecting historical information related to specific aspects of the urban centre: demographics, business activity (types of business), cultural activity (cultural events, museums, cultural organisations, cultural and creative industries), peacebuilding activity, racial character, monument building, as they were formed following specific political events.
•  Bringing to the surface multi-temporal perspectives of Nicosia that would encourage the emergence and discussion of marginalised or, in some cases, conflicting historical narratives.
• Facilitating history education across the divide.

One of the deliverables of the project is the production of an interactive map that would include information on these specific aspects of the urban centre in relation to the key events mentioned above. The visualisation of these data will be made through selected places of interested such as squares, or monumental buildings. For this purpose, and in the context of the BFPAF 2022  we invited everyone who has any visual or written material related to public spaces in the centre of Nicosia, such as squares or garden, to visit our scanning station.

This project has received funding from the Research and Promotion Foundation’s, RESTART  «Excellence Hubs (Bridge Programmes)» and Pillar IV – Bridge Programmes, RIF Proposal No: EXCELLENCE/0421/0566. 

Project Partners:

CYENS Centre of Excellence, Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, Appios Creative Studio.

Creative Team:

Antigone Heraclidou is a Research Associate at the Museum Lab of CYENS Centre of Excellence. She holds a PhD in Modern History from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She is the author of Imperial Control in Cyprus: Education and Political Manipulation in the British Empire(2017).  She co-edited several books and has published her work in international journals.  She worked closely with several museums in Nicosia from her post as an Officer at Nicosia Tourism Board, while recently she co-curated the exhibition Ledra Palace: Dancing on the Line, at the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia.

Esra Plümer-Bardak is an art historian, researcher and active member of Cyprus based civil society organisations. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st-century western and near eastern art, with a focus on artistic strategies related to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatric treatment methods. Her wider interests include publications and invited talks on rethinking art history narratives in the Turkish Cypriot Community in Cyprus, and canon formation in conflicting histories and archives. For further info visit esraplumer.com.