Suspended Spaces #1

Resulting from a collective (Brent Klinkum, Daniel Lê, Françoise Parfait, Éric

Valette), the project Suspended Spaces was born in 2007 from a meeting between artistes and researchers around a specific site, Varosha, the modern beach suburb of the Cypriot city, Famagusta, abandoned then encircled after the Turkish offensive on the North of the island in 1974. A real spatial parenthesis, both a monument and a no man's land, this ghost town questions our stories and our history, that of policy failures that led men to the disaster that certain from of modernity has failed to avoid.

The project is interested in border and buffer zones, no man's land, in suspended spaces, those spaces marked by conflicts and temporarily suspended to economic and political decisions which might allow them to decide on a representation en and a defused use. This project is inscribed within a contemporary geo-political reflection searches to envisage these spaces from an artistic and aesthetic point of view. For this first chapter, more than 30 artists and theoricans were invited on residences to Cyprus and elsewhere, resulting in the production of artistic works and texts which were exhibited at the Maison de la culture in Amiens in January 2010.

The evening will be the opportunity to present the project in it's different facets using a performative conference form with the presence of many of the project's actors.

From a common experience of the sites, the videos and sound works which have been produced take their inspiration in one manner or another, in this particular suspended space, for which the powerful impact but also the melancholy were experienced by all the actors of this rather utopic project.