Adil, Alev (2009) An architecture of forgetting: A poetics of exile. In: Memory & Nostalgia: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Cultural Studies Symposium May 2007 Ege University, Izmir, Turkey. Ege Universitesi Basimevi, Izmir, Turkey. ISBN 9789754838022

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Abstract

Nicosia, the medieval walled capital city of Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964 and remains the last divided capital in Europe. While the border between the two communities was opened in 2003 the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities still live separated by a Dead Zone that commemorates and perpetuates two small forgotten wars.

Alev Adil explores how this border works as a site of memory and its attendant forgettings. In six short film-poems, Hotel Amnesia, My Favourite Dream, The Ruined Cinema, A Small Forgotten War, Memory and The Impossibility of Fidelity and The Names of All Her Dolls she interrogates the logic of the autobiographies, histories and silences that produced her memories of this place and its ghosts, this non-place where politics and private reverie melt into myth in the Mediterranean heat.

Four photo galleries, A Calendar of Empty Beds, Dead Zone, Fugitive Itineraries and Havana/Nicosia pursue and flee memory through images taken between 2006-8 in Amsterdam, Brussels, Havana, Istanbul, Izmir, Koln, Nicosia, Niejmegen, Prague and Vilnius. They reveal the spaces where we are all in transit, exiled from our pasts, dreaming of fugitive itineraries, tailing and fleeing from our ghosts.

In An Architecture of Forgetting the urge to remember and the compulsion to forget are locked in complicity. Singular identity becomes an assemblage of voices, a haunted clan: the detective, the analyst, the archivist, the academic, the assassin: all searching for clues, tampering with the evidence, hoping for a conclusion that does not come.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Title of Proceedings:	Memory & Nostalgia: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Cultural Studies Symposium May 2007 Ege University, Izmir, Turkey
Additional Information:	11th International Cultural Studies Symposium, May 9-11, 2007, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Memory, Poetry, Identity, Cyprus, Exile, Displacement, Diaspora
Pre-2014 Departments:	School of Humanities & Social Sciences
Related URLs:	Organisation
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 09:17
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/6703

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