Buffer Fringe 2015

Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival 2015 took over the streets of the old city of Nicosia on the 10th of October 2015. The Festival’s theme was “Performing Urban Memory”. Performances lasted 15-30 minutes and they took place at side-streets; old buildings’ façades; whilst others flicked and flashed on shops’ windows. In this way, audience embarked on a journey of performances which enabled the exploration of invisible buffer zones in the heart of the city and at the fringes of our collective memory. The audience transformed from a still, sitting, silent audience into a dynamic, moving, noisy, interfering, and curious participants.

A walking tour guided the audience to the performance venues. The route firstly led to Arabahmet District and continued to Ledras Street ending up with a closing party at the Home for Cooperation. In the second year of the Festival, the Home for Cooperation expanded beyond the buffer zone to explore a more dynamic, marginal, and flowing performance route between various public spaces at both sides of the divide. Through opening new spaces in the public sphere for contemporary artists and bringing their works to the street, the Buffer Fringe Festival 2015 aimed to de-/re-/construct the social, spatial, and symbolic formation of the old city of Nicosia, to find out meanings, signs, and myths of the city on the fringes of memory, to celebrate the play of differentness, marginality, and unexpectedness and to blur the distinction between performers and audiences.

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