I got up early and cycled to the Ledra Palace crossing to collect some pictures of an event by a Turkish Cypriot artist that took place last Saturday (the very day Manifesta 6 was supposed to start) at the Selimiye Square.
Sumer, the guy I was meeting, was already there at a coffee shop. His work was a poster showing a drawing of a Gothic niche of one of the old Lusignan churches in the north (nowadays an art gallery) combined with the logo of Manifesta 6 positioned upside down within it. It somehow looked like a weird version of the road sign STOP.
“I showed it last week at the Liverpool Biennial,” he explained. “But the real show should be back here, at home.”
We were approached by the former driver of a former minister (made an ex following the latest ‘government’ reshuffle in the north). “Problems, big problems,” he replied to my enquiries about his well-being and wandered off.
On my way back, still not very much awake (the night before having attended another of “ex-Manifesta” parallel shows until very late), I stopped in Ledra Street for a carob-walnut ice-cream, bought a newspaper, and saw two of my friends sitting at the Caf? Flo arguing about the supremacy of Nashville over Someone Likes It Hot.
I went down to the Eleftheria Square. In the centre, surrounded by the usual crowd of old local men and some foreign guys who looked “very much unemployed”, two hunky guys were building the Memory Box.
I remembered what the press release for this project, another “ex-M6”, said: “The Memory Box: a container of people’s tales, a free space where each of us can recount episodes of our own lives, of our own passions, of our own dreams and frustrations. (…) Available to all.”
“Why do you think Manifesta was cancelled?” I had asked one of the foreign artists visiting the island during the show that took place at the Artos the night before.
“Money,” he had answered. “They didn’t have money. And the curators were arguing.”
I circled the square, said ‘hello’ to an Iranian lady whose husband had just opened a shop down the road (the night before her son had also been at the show helping with catering), spotted another friend of mine, an artist, heading toward his studio, and started moving back home.
I passed by the Omeriye Mosque and the remains of the third Lusignan Palace. On the house next to the residence of a very old representative of the even older (some say the world’s oldest) profession I saw a sign “Poleitai”. I called. “A hundred and ninety thousand pounds,” said a male voice.
“Excuse me but are you sure we are talking about the same place?” I wanted to make sure. “In the red light district? The one that has been for sale for years?”
“Yes, in the old town,” the man slowed down his speech. “One, nine, zero.”
Slightly shocked, I stopped for another coffee at the tavern belonging to a lady in a wig who every week organises discos for Chinese girls and their Cypriot beaus. Next to me, several workers from the building site next to the “ex-Manifesta” offices (now the Power House) were having their “double metrio, middle-morning shots”. “An extension to the offices,” the workers said when asked about their job.
My next stop was at Andreas’, my local grocer, a gentle man. I asked him about prices of old houses in the neighbourhood.
“You have come too late,” he sighed. “The prices have gone up. Now, they are all more than a hundred. Not worth it any more.”
I proceeded home. On the roof of my house there were two Pontians, hired by my landlady to do some repair jobs. Kumari, her Sri Lankan maid, was running up and down the stairs, serving them coffee and cakes. She stopped for a second to whisper to me that they were not OK.
“They are not in the middle,” she said. “They tried to touch my friend.”
I went to the kitchen and started cooking. Some friends, who had just come back to Cyprus from Istanbul, from another Manifesta-post-mortem discussion, were coming for dinner. A phone rang. A journalist from London wanted to know what the outcome of the trial of one of the biennial’s curators that took place in Nicosia a week before was.
“Postponed,” I said. “As far as I know, it is postponed.”
“Have people said something?” he kept on asking. “Has there been anything in the press?”
“Well, not really, as far as I know,” I answered.
How could I tell them that for most people on the island the whole thing is not even in their Memory Box?
