The Fine Art and Graphic & Digital Design programmes, Department of Design and Multimedia, University of Nicosia organise the public online discussion titled Local art, architecture, and design history: Decolonising Writing and Research Practices. The event is supported by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nicosia.

Engaging an interdisciplinary perspective, participants to the panel are academics, researchers, and practitioners, active in historical research in the arts, architecture and design, who are invited to reflect on how their respective fields are historicized in Cyprus and in the broader geographical and cultural context of the East Mediterranean.

Acknowledging the region’s past and present as a place of colonial contact, conflict, population displacement and migration, the panel discussion seeks to understand the effect of socio-political conditions on the writing of history of creative practices. Concurrently, it raises the question of whether the histories of these practices are written via imposed colonial and post-colonial lenses, leading to adopted/imported research methodologies.

The example through which such concerns are examined is Cyprus, a small, ethnically-divided island-nation, where the respective motherlands and last imperial ruler imposed forms of cultural colonialism. The challenges in terms of shaping art, architecture and design history are manifold. They are framed by a nascent research culture, where publishing has been minimal in terms of academic historical output, and writing about art, architecture and design history has mostly taken place via media-style writing (newspaper, magazines and journals). This has meant that there has been relatively little reflection on:

– how we carry out research in the fields of art, architecture and design history and

– what are the types of historiographical, archival and formal (institutional) support structures that we have come to rely upon.

Prompted by such questions, this online event seeks to initiate a discussion on the writing and the making of art, design and architectural history in Cyprus, reflecting too on matters of archival research and preservation, which will hopefully lead to further research activities. Immediate plans include/Among immediate plans is the launching of a research lab and the preparation of an international conference under the same theme scheduled for 2023.

The discussion will be conducted in English. It will be free of charge and livestreamed.

Participants

Christodoulos Hadjichristodoulou, Archivist

Vayia Karaiskou, Art historian

Gabriel Koureas, Art Historian

Costas Mantzalos, Academic and artist

Petros Phokaides, Architect, historian/theorist of architecture

Esra Plumer-Bardak, Art historian, researcher.

Initiators / Moderators

Niki Sioki, Design educator and historian

Evanthia (Evi) Tselika, Art historian and cultural practitioner

Elena Parpa, Art historian and curator