Imagining Home – Between the Walls Exhibition

We are excited to share the opening of this international and multi-communal art exhibition presented in the Nicosia Buffer Zone location, crossing Ledras-Lokmaci, exploring the idea of identity and home. The exhibition is directed by D6:EU, a cultural organisation based in Cyprus and working internationally, led by Argyro Toumazou, in collaboration with artist Julie Gauthron of the French NGO Collectif Habitante, and with the support and partnership of Home for Cooperation.

Public Opening: Friday 4 October 2024, 7pm – 9.30pm
Duration: 4 October – 31 October 2024
Opening hours: Wednesdays to Fridays: 5pm – 9pm, Saturdays: 11am – 7pm
Venue: Master Plan venue within the crossing area, Ledras – Lokmaci

Artists: Efi Savvides, Sümer Erek, Julie Gauthron, Nafia Akdeniz, Anaïs LLobet
Curator: Alessandro Vincentelli


The exhibition Imagining Home – Between the Walls delves into the profound concept of “home.” Through curated displays, it explores ways to reimagine houses and the idea of “home” in Nicosia, 50 years after the events of 1974 and 60 years after the establishment of UNFICYP.

A house provides the foundational space and physical form for life to thrive, while a home nourishes, protects, and fosters a sense of identity. It also requires reinvention. The absence of a home, whether due to conflict or displacement, only magnifies its significance. This exhibition focuses on reimagining home, emphasizing the potential of political and social reinvention, as well as the trauma of the ‘unfinished house’ and the fragile house as a body.

Artists play a vital role in shaping our understanding of “home” by channeling personal experience. They ask: How can they dream and reimagine a home in the ruins? How can artists be the ‘builder of worlds’ and the new storytellers? The exhibition begins with the premise of dreaming of a house, taking a line from the French writer Gaston Bachelard, who described a house as both body and soul.

Building on the idea of the house as a fragile body, this exhibition seeks to engage Cypriots in a dialogue about the resonance of the word “home.” Home is a concept that transcends time and place. While it is intertwined with a sense of belonging, it is also connected to questions of injustice and stories of displacement.

The political writer Marcello Di Cinto describes the walls in Nicosia as follows: “The walls impose a simplified identity on those who cannot cross them. You are either from here or from there. You are either one of Us or one of Them. The walls allow for no nuance, no mutually agreed upon story” (Di Cintio, 2013). The walls serve as both a physical and symbolic divide. Encountering the walls and barriers in the buffer zone reinforces the shared identities and traumas of each community.

A reminder from the French Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun: “An abandoned house is like an unfinished story.”

While homes can be made, cultural geographers and NGOs remind us that they can also be “unmade,” and people can be “unhomed.” The word “refugee” here is nuanced by the layered histories of displacement and loss for islanders. This exhibition aims to weave together the past and the present to generate new, more hopeful visions. As Collectif Habitante reminds us, it offers “an opportunity to really look out through the shattered doorways and windows to think about the future, and about the dreamed house to come.”

Artists bios and works:

Efi Savvides: Efi Savvides is a visual artist and art educator. She is the founder of Artstudio Laboratories, an art education centre operating in Nicosia since 1985. Her work examines conditions of violence and exclusion experienced by minority groups, immigrants, and refugees in Cyprus. By engaging in long-term relationships and interactions with affected individuals, families, and communities, Savvides has produced a compelling body of work drawn from her own committed photographic practice.
Savvides presents new and previously unseen photography and video work from her extensive documentation of a single refugee family. This work offers personal insights into the diverse ways of creating a home, in this case Narin and her sisters. It is part of her larger project, which documents refugee families living in Richmond Village, an abandoned housing estate within the British military base of Dhekelia.

Nafia Akdeniz: Poet, Ethnographer and Researcher, has been carrying out an ethnographic research on Varosha Narratives, as Mnemonic Resistance, and explores the narratives of forcibly displaced Varoshians as place meaning making processes of refugee experience and conceptualization of the past, the present and the future. Her research interests include narrative communication, place attachment, memory studies, refugee studies, creative writing, critical methodologies, contemporary ethnographies, and poetic inquiry.

In this exhibition, she presents her new poetry-based interactive project that draws on Akdeniz’s ethnographic research on Varosha narratives, “We Are Not Ghosts”, a poetic sound walk into Varosha public space memory, through narratives of forced displacement and desire of return. While the area is increasingly open to visitors, this initiative in word and sound evokes the human impact of Famagusta /Varosha recent history and aims at creating new understandings for both locals and visitors.

Julie Gauthron: is French artist and designer, living in Nicosia, and is a member of Collectif Habitante. They are a group dedicated to developing projects around the theme of the human relationship to the house. As a designer, Gauthron has been interested in elements of co-design and ideas and theories of collective habitation. She addresses renewed thinking around questions of spatial justice, both physical and social and how this resonates so strongly within the context of Cyprus.

Here, Gauthron creates a series of models and wireframe sculptures of houses, generating a typology of fragile forms as shelters. Her sculptures are intensely physically, ‘embodied’ and have a direct lineage to her drawing practice. Each home resembles an imaginary, desired house. Additionally, here she creates two life-size metal wire drawings of houses, this time made in rebar, allowing visitors to move between their spaces, walls, and doors.

Sümer Erek: Multidisciplinary artist, Erek’s art practice is deeply influenced by his experiences of displacement, trauma, and a longing for new futures. Originally trained as a sculptor, Erek views objects and their creation as processes of bringing new worlds to life, whether rooted in the past, present, or with imagined futures.
Erek will create several modular structures made of found and cast materials. These towers are made from a range of materials such as pulped education textbooks, palm fronds, and found wood strips taken from old windows and doors. These forms have been arranged into loosely fastened triangles and hexagons, serving as both shield and shelter. The works are influenced by Erek’s return to live in an unfinished house in Cyprus after many years living in London and elsewhere. His return tells a story of exile and the steps to assemble a house and home, reflecting the psychological impact of a long history of enforced loss and displacement.

Anaïs LLobet: French author, documentary filmmaker and AFP journalist, who lived in Cyprus for five years, and has already published a novel based on the historical context of Cyprus in 2022, entitled Au café de la ville perdue, which was among the winners of the Mare Nostrum Awards 2022.
As part of the Collectif Habitante, in this exhibition she is conducting a series of interviews both with refugees and with the UNFICYP peacekeepers, developing a collaborative work on what making home far away from home means.The writer contributes new texts that highlight the role of UNFICYP veterans as caretakers and custodians for thousands of people’s houses who at the same time, find their own way of building a collective temporary home while caring for people’s lost houses in the buffer zone.

Alessandro Vincentelli: International curator and producer based in the UK and Athens, Greece. He is former Curator of Exhibitions & Research at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK where he worked for 16 years. After relocating to Aegina in 2021, he works with artists in a collaborative interdisciplinary studio project Vessel. In 2021, he was curator and creative director for the international Art and Ecology Triennial exhibition, EKO8, in Maribor, Slovenia, entitled A Letter to the Future. It was staged in an empty textile factory with works by 25 international artists, including Yoko Ono, Mikhail Karikis, Jasmina Cibic and Antonis Pittas.