Collaging Nicosia : engaging with contested spaces through collage-making

Abstract

This research aims to investigate how collage, a creative practice, can provide productive opportunities to engage with contentious debates in contested spaces. Collage is approached as a multifaceted medium characterised by its capacity for fragmentation, remaking, and re-perception, offering a process-oriented approach conducive to dialogue and intellectual engagement. It allows for constant experimentation, facilitating ideas and fragments to be explored and arranged, encouraging intellectual engagement both for the collagist and among the viewers. Contested spaces, on the other hand, can be imagined as somehow counter to the nature of collage. While these spaces are defined by diverse voices, perspectives, identities, and beliefs coexisting or co-owning a space, they are often locked in conflict, exemplifying situations where differences struggle to harmonise. Drawing inspiration from Lebbeus Woods’ Sarajevo Project, which uses architecture as a means of communication and critique in war-damaged cities, this study investigates the potential of collage to engaged with contested spaces. The testing site for this research is Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, which has been politically and physically divided for over five decades between Turkish Cypriots in the north and Greek Cypriots in the south. This research employs a collage-based methodology, where collage is not only the focus but also the method of working. Various means of documentation, such as diary writing, video recording, photographing, sketching, and exhibition, are used to document the process, forming data that can be organized, communicated, and discussed. This thesis consists of two parts. Part I focuses on theorisation about collage and contested spaces, exploring concepts of agency and examining Woods’ Sarajevo Project as a case study. Part II progresses through five stages of collage-making in Nicosia, exploring the deceptive, imaginative, interpretative, spatial, and dialogical potentials inherent in collage. These stages deeply engage with the city’s sociopolitical fabric, expanding the horizon of collage-making to encompass not only artistic expression but also description, critique, analysis, interpretation, and imagination. This study extends an invitation to researchers in contested space studies to embrace collage as a tool for examining diverse historical and contextual spaces. Through such explorations, spatial thinking can be enriched and expanded, uncovering the complexities that shape perceptions of what is considered given and unchangeable in divided cities.