I’ve made you a palm tree

By introducing innovative ways to experience live artwork, visual artist PASHIAS creates a drive-in performance, inviting audience members to drive by a human body positioned next to ‘planted’ palm-trees – a staple feature of Cyprus’ urban and cultural landscape. A tall and sturdy column rooted into soil, defying the horizon with its vertical outreach, opening up towards the sky into an ‘eruption’ of long and sharp needle-like leaves. The palm-tree seed stands for a mobile, displaced and appropriated fragment of our local identity that functions within a contested area of ‘belonging’ and pride, signaling the precarious nature of current sociopolitical settings.

* The performance is accompanied by the 24/7 visual exhibition “I’ve made you a palm-tree” by PASHIAS in collaboration with Iosif Hadjikyriakos (Phivos Stavrides Foundation – Larnaca Archives) and Katerina Scoufaridou (Emblem Gallery) located at former Hondos Centre opposite Paul Restaurant (20, Zinas Kanther Street) that can be viewed from the outside any time of the day or night during the month of December. More information: www.pashias.art/ive-made-you-a-palm-tree

About the Process:

The live performance “I’ve made you a palm tree” brings together the fields of visual art and design – in terms of contemporary creation – alongside archival research in collaboration with the Phivos Stavrides Foundation, revealing the presence of palm trees onto the Cypriot landscape, as a cultural symbol that relates to identified locality and the notion of displacement. The human body is paralleled to the physical characteristics and conceptual parameters of the palm tree – a tall and sturdy column rooted into the soil, defying the horizon with its vertical outreach, opening up towards the sky into an ‘eruption’ of long needle-like leaves. According to the palm seed’s historical route of travel and implementation in Cyprus, the migration of sociopolitical ideals presents itself as a process of appropriation resulting in integrated symbols – both familiar and local, as well as ‘foreign’ and exotic – that open up a field of contested identities.

Pages: www.pashias.art / www.mddlarchitects.com / www.facebook.com/psflarnaka