Roaming Assembly#32 ~ Ever Given ~ convened by Thkio Ppalies

As Palestinian peer, Munir Fasheh, writes “we discovered our sources of strength that were connected to our internal immune systems.” Taking this as our starting point, the focus of this assembly is to unpack the notion of the ever given, as in, what are the sources of strength and resistance that we have at our disposal, at hand, at all times? Departing from the case of the Suez Canal incident in 2021, when ‘mere’ strong winds resulted in a giant container ship named the Ever Given blocking the canal and causing a global trade disruption, we are interested in acknowledging and contemplating on forces that have the potential to traverse scale.

The island of Cyprus has historically been a crossroads for trade, extractivism and antagonistic colonial powers, due to its geostrategic location in the Mediterranean and its abundant natural resources. We see this until today, as large corporations and global powers are increasingly exploiting the island either for its low tax schemes or for military operations in the region. In this sense, Cyprus is not dissimilar to the Suez Canal, a narrow passageway serving global interests, bearing implications beyond its geographical boundaries.

In response, now more than ever, local communities are organising and (re)forming radical configurations, bringing together activists, artists, musicians, writers and academics from across the island, but also making active efforts to create and revive transnational alliances with communities across the region. The assembly is curated with these urgencies in mind, inviting participants whose practices are demonstrative or expressive of qualities that could be situated as ever given and in solidarity with critical infrastructures and grassroots ecosystems.

26 March 2025 ~ PROGRAM

10:00 Word of Welcome by

Louli Michaelidou, on behalf of SPEL, Gabriëlle Schleijpen, on behalf of DAI.

10:15 Intro to Thkio Ppalies, the curator of Roaming Assembly#32~ Ever Given by

Marina Christodoulidou, curator and COOP tutor as well as DAI's Archipelago Weaver 2025

10:20 Intro to Roaming Assembly#32~ Ever Given by

Thkio Ppalies (Peter Eramian, Stelios Kallinikou), a non-profit artist-run space in Nicosia.

10:45 Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen

Oraib Toukan

Inspired by Munir Fasheh’s “soils”, Toukan's text thinks through and with the spirit of geology, to try and understand why images sometimes appear the way they do. She has long been preoccupied by the parallels between the grain of an image, and the soils of this earth. She begins with one parent of soil, stone. Specifically, Palestinian stone, both as image and metaphor, to explore why this tiny overexposed part of this earth, with its exceptional cloudless clarity and remarkable layered hues, is so hard to see? She will muse over three iconic images that have recently resurfaced and recirculated to contemplate the space between the seen, and the unseen. She will draw at length from Richard Fortey’s geology as “the collective unconscious of the world”, one that is concerned with what geology does as opposed to what geology is.

11:35 Tactical junctures

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Recent disenchantment with western liberal institutions might be indicative of a much larger tactical juncture in the arts. It calls for a more profound review of strategies, skill sets, longings, affective investments and engagements as we came to know them. In the face of genocide and oppression some of us think of abandoning art and find more meaningful ways and practices. Others are busy trying to rescue what’s left of liberal freedoms. As night falls on the liberal project the stars have already always been there. How does one find one’s bearings?

12.25 A choreographed identity: exploring the historical position of women through traditional Cypriot dance

Ilaeira Leto Agrotou Georgiou

Studying traditional dance as a historical source uncovers the history of a people who had no access to record keeping. The Cypriot population of the early-to-mid twentieth century, a mainly agrarian community, had little opportunity to write down their lives for the sake of prosperity. Instead, they were extensively represented by a colonial power eager to rule, and an emerging, local middle-class eager to define themselves. Women especially lacked the resources to represent themselves, and were instead extensively represented and infused with the symbolism of an emerging nation-state, one struggling to define itself against the remnants of the former colonial order and the scars of intercommunal conflict. Traditional dances are not permanent fixtures of a static cultural identity, immune to the changes of times. The transformation of Cypriot women’s dancing reflects ideas of gender and ethnolinguistic identity during Cyprus’s long twentieth century.

13:15 - 14:50 Lunch (vegetarian/vegan) on the roof terrace of SPEL

External guests need to make a reservation. Please scroll to Practicalities.

15:00 “Choosing the Sad End”

Ali Hussein Al-Adawy & Haytham el-Wardany

“Choosing the Sad End” is a four-chapter artistic research project that critically interrogates national liberation and transnational solidarity and poses the question: How did the left's political and cultural-artistic project shift from an internationalist liberation project to just symbolic gestures within a globalized political economy of solidarity?

Through dialogues with four characters in four different cities –Amman, Nicosia, Beirut, and Tunis– the project seeks to inspire a political imagination in the current moment. Those characters act as gateways to specific archival and historical networks, consisting mainly of various publications, knowledge production, designs, artworks, and films. These materials engage with national liberation, decolonization movements, and transnational solidarity in the “Third World” (Global South).

In each city, the project collaborates with a co-curator and partnering art space around the core questions of the project beyond the limitations of the Cold War scope to explore a grassroots perspective.

15:50 Waters of Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt: Tactile Affect, Dancing Memory

Stavros Karayanni

Dance embodies not only what seems obvious and apparent but what flows surreptitiously in the grooves that open as ideology erodes emotion. The movement that attracts me is fuelled by this flow and seeks to gesture, literally and figuratively, towards prescribed behaviour but also proscribed. The body’s kinesthesia is therefore inextricably linked to the various kinds of heritage that the body carries. Often, this complex heritage shapes those emotional layers where Memory sculpts its presence in the movement. This presence may also function as storytelling – a narrative of the body’s remembered but also unconscious history, a fluid and kinaesthetic record of the body’s own history and a choreographed expression of trauma and loss, but also the cultural wealth that is intrinsic to every body. While investigating Body and Memory, this presentation poses questions that have to do with how we understand Memory in terms of ideology and in terms of the body; how we are able to dance our body’s narrative, and how we can attain an embodiment of desire as at once a life-affirming force and a sorrowful loss. And always the movement, carrying a body that is lightened by the exuberance of self discovery and heavied by the promise of deliverance just as the Memory springs forth like an oracle from the future to prophesy the past.

16:40 Walking Through the Ruins

Yael Navaro

In this presentation, Navaro will take the audience 'on a walk' with visuals through her anthropological work on postwar Nicosia, Cyprus and post-genocide Antakya, Turkey. Centering storytelling and historical contextualization, she will discuss people's engagements with spaces, land, homes, objects, sacred sites and trees left behind from others who used to live there prior to the catastrophe. Walking through these sites of mass political violence, She will carry the conversation through the concepts that have emerged out of her work.

17:20 - 17:30 Tea break

17.35 Nothing Will Remain other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World

Haig Aivazian & Noor Abed

"Don’t be sad. No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat. No one will manage to swallow it. Don’t worry.”

~ From Wadih Sanbar’s last words to his son, Palestinian historian and poet Elias Sanbar.

Haig Aivazian and Noor Abed enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, hisses, the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.

In a recent correspondence spanning several months, the pair exchanged reflections, quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs and recitations. The performance acts as an active labour of selecting, remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, reassessing, and reassembling elements from the correspondence, as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists’ respective trajectories.

Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, the pair attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a resonance chamber traveled by vibration and transformed into a disparate choir.

18:30-19:50 Dinner (vegetarian/vegan) on the roof terrace of SPEL

External guests need to make a reservation. Please scroll to Practicalities.

CONTINUATION OF THE PROGRAM

20:00 Honest Electronics

20:00 Kasska

21:00 Stelios Ilchuk & x.ypno

22:00 dj harama

Honest Electronics, a Cypriot independent record label and a collective which aims to activate locals to perform in a do-it-together social platform, presents a music lineup featuring Stelios Ilchuk and x.ypno: performing unreleased material from their upcoming second album alongside previously released tracks in the South-Cypriot dialect; Kasska, whose songs are driven by breakbeats and a sharp rhythmic flow, performs songs that give the Cypriot lyrics a new pace, while carrying themes of resilience, perseverance, and self-responsibility; dj harama, concludes the day with an experimental dance set fitting to the transitional hours, moving through different genres while pushing the listening boundaries of the dancefloor.

Learn more about DAI's Roaming Assembly and visit earlier editions including video-documentation.

Learn how Roaming Assembly#32 is part of the extensive study program of DAI Roaming Academy during Confluence#4 in Nicosia: BULLETIN#4 ~ 19-30 March, 2025

Note that not only Roaming Assembly#32 on March 26 is open to the public, also the Kitchen Acts on the 24th and 25 th of March and Palestine Teach Out#8 with Hanan Toukan on the evening of the 25th are welcoming anybody who is interested to DAI@SPEL.

PRACTICALITIES

We are absolutely thrilled to be generously hosted for Roaming Assembly#32 by the State Gallery of Contemporary Art - SPEL in Nicosia, Cyprus.

FREE ENTRY ~ NO RESERVATION NEEDED ~ BE WELCOME !

Address: State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL
73 Ammochostou Street, 1016 Nicosia, Cyprus

LUNCH & DINNER: UNIQUELY UPON RESERVATION !

For external visitors registration for the dinner is mandatory. Please register no later than 22 March upcoming with Kasté Seskeviciute <Kastesesk@protonmail.com> and bring cash to pay to her on the spot for your ticket. If you are registering for both lunch (10 euro) and the dinner (12 euro) you will only pay 16 euro in total (including a glass of wine during dinner)!

AFTER DINNER THE BAR WILL BE OPEN !

@ 2 euro per drink in cash only.