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Percevieng Academy, Cyprus, consisted of two parts. (1) Perceptually map and trans- a a late urban conditions of division, (2) follow the dough.
The physical division of the Peacekeeping wall through Nicosia geographically centeredthis Perceiving Academy, but unity, not division, is what inspired, informed, andanchored our participation, methods, techniques, and artistic aspirations. Geographically,the architecture and the landscape collaborate to form the United Nations Buffer Zone inCyprus and that zone anchored our public actions and walks. The division indiscriminatelycuts through Nicosia much like the Berlin wall cut into streets, buildings, and parks in the20th century. Like the center of a record player spindle anchors the revolutionary axis of avinyl record, we walked around and around, around and around the city by walking throughtwo of the three gates in the Buffer Zone. Over 14-days, Perceivers met 8-12 hours a day,to exercise public spaces of unity across the geographic division in Nicosia. To do this wefollowed the waste, water, and wheat lines that cross division and ecologically, culturally,and architecturally stitch Cyprus together.
At the time of this Perceiving, Nicosia is the last divided capital in Europe. “The UnitedNations recognizes northern Cyprus as territory of the Republic of Cyprus under Turkishoccupation (wiki; St Louis search; 2020).” Turkey is the only country at the time of thisPerceiving to recognize northern Cyprus as a sovereign country, the Turkish Republic ofNorthern Cyprus. The United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus divides the territory of Cypruslike a belt stretched across a human waist. The Peacekeeping waist stretches 134 squaremiles and varies from 66 feet to more than 4.3 miles wide. It is encircled and filled with antitankditches, watchtowers, minefields, and has been controlled since July 20, 1974 whenaround 150,000 Greek Cypriots were expelled from their homes in northern Cyprus. Theheavily armed global peace keeping agency is casually yet carefully poised on the southside of the UN Buffer Zone, and the Turkish military at attention on the other. Every Cypriothas a personal story to tell about this history, but like a vinyl record with two sides, mostCypriots perceive recent island history in one of two ways.
A city is a metabolism and each day the Perceivers followed the doughy landscapetruths. In Cyprus, wheat connects cultural, ecological, and perceptual spaces through publicand private water. This is a type of connection without unification; food and landscapeinfrastructures connect but do not unify. In Nicosia that started changing when wasterwater engineers became de facto diplomats and waste became an opportunity for politicalinternational peacekeeping diplomacy, and an opportunity for the Perceivers to choreographurban learning environments.
The Perceivers followed the wheat and water from our toilets to the wastewater treatmentplant, where after 24-days the recharged water is discharged back into the fields,farms, and taps, back into our restaurants, markets, fountains, kitchens, bathrooms, andall orchestrated to serve the health of our private and public bodies. Perceivers geographicallywalked, smelled, touched, tasted, and listened our way through these spatialloops in and around Nicosia to generate procedural knowledge, not merely propositionalknowledge of these life-landscape loops, these life-landscape lines in a non-abstract way.The assumption of Perceivers is that first-hand, somatic experiences with these publicand private infrastructural loops will wake us up to the climatological, cultural, and civicrealities on which our lives and countries depend. Attending to details in our immediateenvironment and connecting those details to larger landscape and material systems helpsus to remain perceptually alert, and reminds us that we have these public details in common.This experiential knowledge helps us (1) consider where we are and how we chooseto behave wherever we go, and (2) the experiences fed our open-ended conversations andcollectively informed the co-design and materialization of a public event, a collective soundscore, and a sound map that we co-produced into a vinyl album.
These walks, also referred to as Perceivings, are place and partner specific, while alsobeing scalable and repeatable to any city. One example is the anti-acclimation walk, whichtook place with engineers at the Nicosia Waste Water Treatment Plant. The anti-acclimationwalk asked Perceivers to pay attention to when we stop smelling the waste around us. Ourdefensive-sensing systems kick in, and we consciously stop noticing the immediate sensoriumand acclimate, block-out, and dull the world around us in order to tolerate and copewith our immediate environment. Acclimatization is a weapon of soft power and NorthAmerican education systems, like the Carlisle Indian School and other Native AmericanBoarding Schools testify to the abuses that can be suffered through acclimatization learningenvironments. Acclimatizing allows us to remain in place and attend to tasks we cannotwalk away from. Anti-acclimation walks ask Perceivers to attend to the moment when ournose-brain connection detaches from our eye-brain connection, and to notice when westop noticing. Noticing the details that connect the everyday environments around us animatesthe complexity of the world, helping to unflatten our sense flattened-ontologies, andlearn how to unite across division.
Anti-acclimation walk, Cyprus. Walking along the steel grading platforms above the microbial vats performing the Anti-acclimation Walk at the New Nicosia Waste Water Treatment Plant. The anti-acclimation walk asked Perceivers to pay attention to when we stop smelling the waste around us. Photo by Eric Ellingsen.
Nicosia Score and album was composed and designed by Eric Ellingsen working collectively with maps made by eleven of the participants in Perceiving Academy, Cyprus. The method is (1) all the Perceiving participants choreograph a public walking path that can be walked in 1-hour at a comfortable pace. Start and end at the same place, for us this was the south Nicosia side of the UN Buffer Zone Famagusta Gate. (2) Divide the loop up into the number of participating Perceivers. (3) Ask each participant to select three urban systems that repeat in their section of the loop, like large trees, flower pots, awnings, fire hydrants, storm water drains, green-white-green-white-green striped concrete filled oil barrels, or bullet holes in facades. (4) Draw a rough sketch in plan view of your section of the loop. Design a quick, non-intricate notational sign for each of your three urban systems. (6) Pacing and counting your footsteps, take your time mapping where each of the urban systems is located in your section of the loop. This is your score, a repeating rhythm of each of your three urban systems. (7) Assign each of your notational signs a different sound and, keeping time, practice walking and sounding each of your three urban systems. (8) Divide the full group of participants into three and teach each group one of the urban systems and its corresponding sound and sign. Keeping time, all the Perceivers walk the entire loop and through every other Perceivers stretch of the loop sounding one different urban system as you pass. You can compress the rhythm and preserve the melodic urban intervals to shorten or lengthen the duration of your song. Work out the kinks as you go. Take your time. Remember, “music is the space between the notes.” Claude Debussy (9) For the final public performance “More than a Salad”, each Perceiver engaged their notational urban score to choreograph a walking sound score with different publics. For the record, after the public performance we worked with Marcus Papageorgiou of AV Playroom Sound Recording Studios. In the record studio, each Perceiver engaged their notational urban score as a musical score, and recorded each urban system as an individual track. After, the individual tracks were mastered into a single song, an urban sound portrait. Like the walk, each participant’s individual track was constructed into one continuous sound loop. At the end, we went on record.
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