A series of public interventions is coming up in the capital as part of Nicosia 2030’s goal for art to be accessible to all. The OTHONI series will take over Nicosia locations for six consecutive weekends across November and December. Seventeen Smart Nicosia screens, located on central streets, will be taken over by video artworks for all to witness and enjoy.

The project starts with three interventions, the first Patience by Lefki Savvidou screened this weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. The statement in Savvidou’s work is clear, “we are running out of patience”. In this case, ‘we’ refers to all individuals, whose formulation is liquid, flexible and ever-changing. Water, the fundamental element of life, can take any form and shape it wants, never rigid and fixed. Contained only by a plastic bag, a thin and damaged membrane, the image parallels a societal framework attempting to enclose individuals into a specific mass. Molecules break out into droplets, advocating for systemic change, demanding space for all versions and variations of singularity.

On the weekend of November 30 and December 1, Yiannis Pappas’ The Wanderer Above the EU Borders will provide a window into the sea landscape. His moving image centres on a dark, still figure, reminiscent of wise men from traditional myths and tales, holding onto a cane. This “wanderer” is tasked with the quest of life, of displacement, the search at home, away from home.

The third is Raafat Majzoub’s To Each Other, We Are Everything, screened on December 7 and 8. Raafat Majzoub puts in text a kind of fictional realism about “an Arab world where me and my friends can live and thrive” void of borders, centred on proximity, safety and care. Being forced into diaspora, Majzoub’s narrative is anchored by the figure of the grandmother, as a form of tender power, the one who prays, the one who envisions a living future. Combined with animated architectural plans of Tripoli’s Hammam Al-Nouri, his home city in Lebanon, the artist documents destruction and abandonment, in need of ‘renovating’ the notion of home, family, of togetherness.

The project was conceived and curated by visual artist Pashias, as part of the parallel programme of the Nicosia International Festival 2024 and it aims to connect citizens and visitors with the city they inhabit, utilising pre-existing means of visual communication to provide a window into the passersby’s daily life.

Each video proposes a moving image, unfolds into an environment and takes the form of a poetic gesture, a personal statement or public interference. Motivated by the urgent necessity for social inclusion, the selected artists re-examine their relationship with the urban environment and their social surroundings, in dialogue or in confrontation with the dominant modes of utilising public space and perceiving individual differences.

From performative images to animated landscapes, object installation to text-based research, OTHONI presents diverse mediums of video art to provide windows for understanding and evaluating our relationship to current social settings.

OTHONI

Public intervention series on screens from various artists. November 23-24 (Lefki Savvidou). November 30-December 1 (Yiannis Pappas). December 7-8 (Raafat Majzoub). https://www.nicosia.org.cy/el-GR/news/nicosia-international-festival/2024/, www.pashias.art/othoni