24 hours with Lia Lapithi
Do you believe in water?
An exhibition in Nicosia manages to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary
Pushing open the big metal door and poking my head around the corner, I came face to face with one of the liveliest and most shocking exhibitions going on in Nicosia. Two dozen black Caretta Caretta turtles looked back at me from their position on the floor, while towering over them were medical water sachets and drips. A bed of 5,000 test tubes and gynaecological tools were placed on either side of the turtles. Lia Lapithi’s exhibition Do you believe in water? has a simple message: Heal nature.
“Environmental issues have been a passion of mine since I was an undergraduate student and I have done some pieces with the sole purpose of bridging the gap between medicine and nature,” Lia explained. “However, I wanted to go out with a camera and enter new territory. I wanted to go out in the open and see if I could focus on ‘healing nature’ rather than human beings. So the element of water, in a way, became the ultimate cure for nature to begin with and I turned to search for it in our landscape.”
The loggerhead turtles are the oldest and most beautiful endangered species still alive today in the Mediterranean but they’re also known for their nesting rituals. This type of turtle always returns to where it was born to lay eggs and Lia felt a connection. “I had insisted on having ‘natural births’ and basic, ‘classic’ gynaecological tools were used when I gave birth. Now that man is intervening, it’s also evident with the turtles hence the tools in the exhibition.”
Lia’s children play a significant role in her life and her daily routine evolves much around them. “I’m up at six every morning because I have to get the kids ready for school,” she says. “I don’t take breakfast only a coffee but I do manage to be at the gym everyday between 8 and 9. After that it’s home, where I have one of my workshops and work straight through to one in the afternoon, when I have to pick up the kids.”
Between nine and one, Lia gets most of the materialistic craftwork done and this is exactly when she worked on the turtles. However, apart from the fibre-glass Caretta Caretta turtles – based on the cast of a dead Caretta she found on the Paphos coastline – Lia’s exhibition is completed with another stage or ‘journey’, as she calls it. Thirty three photographs taken at intervals of exactly 2.5km along the 82.5km length of the Pedieos river in Cyprus line a wall of the gallery. The series originates in the Troodos mountains, flows through Nicosia (the occupied side) and ends at the Mediterranean sea.
“After I’ve picked up the kids and had an afternoon siesta, I’m back to work but my afternoons are all about research and for this ‘journey’ I spent time reading and studying at the same time as the kids.”
With a couple of maps, a very expensive camera and a GPS, she set out to document, casually and spontaneously the once lively river. “Garbage, dead cattle and barbed wire is what I could see while on this journey. I was scared to death walking around with a camera in tow with all that military paraphernalia and felt like a war reporter but decided to exhibit Cyprus in a way that tourist guides and holiday brochures don’t. This is the real Cyprus.”
Lia believes the lack of caring for the river reflects a kind of unstable ‘territorial anxiety’ that a situation like the Cyprus problem can induce. “It’s a territorial anxiety involving a geographic, political, economic and social burden”. She describes her piece of work as Green Art not Green Peace. “Green Art has a nice ring to it and with my work I find it interesting that you see a scruffy fringe of Cyprus with everything looking quite banal at least to anyone familiar with the topology of the island but then you realise there are dead cows thrown in the river, garbage on either side, the water has dried out and a large part is sewage waste. What first appears to be ordinary is in fact quite extraordinary.”
Being a freelance installation artist, Lia explains she’s lucky enough to be able to cook and feed her children by 7:30, get them in bed by 8 and finally relax with her husband by 9, enjoying a good film or the company of friends. However, her thirst for healing the environment and voicing her concerns through art carry on until midnight when she finally wraps it up and is off to bed.
Do you believe in water? Last chance to see the exhibition at the Pantheon Gallery today from 5-8 pm (Tel: 22 670843) or call Lia at 99-613360 for an appointment
