An Architecture of Forgetting: Journeys in the Dead Zone

Alev Adil

This visual essay presents a series of film-poems and a slideshow of images, captured from the Buffer Zone in Nicosia, produced by writer and artist Alev Adil under the title An Architecture of Forgetting: Journeys in the Dead Zone in 2008.

Dead Zone (25 images taken in Lefkosa/Lefkosia, 2006)

The Dead Zone is a part of us all, the no-man’s-land where memory resides. Where there is memory, even as a debased political commodity, there is death and there is poetry. This ruined architecture of memory is not merely a metaphor but a methodology. Memory is the architect of the Dead Zone, of this labyrinth at the heart of Cypriot identity.

The Ruined Cinema (4 minutes)

The ruined cinema is the key to everything: it is the set for the screen that memory is projected upon. Snow filters through the collapsed ceiling, motes melting and dancing in the light of the projector. The red velvet curtains are ripped and charred, rich ragged shrouds from a glamorous past. Everything is devastated and beautiful, as irretrievably strange and lost as Salamis.

A Small Forgotten War (4 minutes)

At the heart of the city there is this wound. Perhaps the Forbidden Zone is almost beautiful in the way it speaks to all of us of our failures, our culpability – unless we choose to forget our own responsibilities for this, our own bloody legacies and see ourselves as only and always the victims of others. Mine is a small forgettable war but all wars give birth to ruins. Ruin eternalizes and naturalizes destruction, as though it has always been this way, and always will be.

Memory and the Impossibility of Fidelity (2 minutes)

On the last day of his life, in the afternoon Lysandros whispered his last poem about Apollo, the gleaming warrior now disguised as a thousand reeling birds, and slipped irretrievably from the spoken to the written word. Where’s the most unjust betrayal? Mourning erases the lost ones, translates them always and only as absence.

The Name of All her Dolls  (3 minutes)

All the names of her dolls. She remembered all the names of all her dolls. Their blind faces lined up, a silent jury in the nursery bearing witness to the blue blurred busyness in the feral shadows of infancy. There is only the memory of all the names, her dolls; the rest is a blanket of forgetting. The urge to remember and the force of resistance, which wants to forget, do not cancel each other out but reach a compromise.

Hotel Amnesia (2 minutes)

Hotels indulge the fantasy that consequence can be cleaned away by the chambermaid. Tomorrow will wipe the slate clean: two glasses by the bathroom sink, miniature bottles of shampoo and bubble bath, a mini bar and price list, the room service menu, dial 9 for an outside line. I sat in cafes, in Vilnius, Prague, Porto, Seville, writing out fugitive itineraries, although I was never quite certain if I was evading my ghosts or tailing them. The urge to remember and the compulsion to forget are locked in complicity.

My Favourite Dream (3 minutes)

All I can remember is the snow and the whirr of the projector. We are talking so intently that the first time I had the dream I paid no attention to the screen at all but in the subsequent iterations I try to watch, to remember what the film is, because I know there’s no possibility of recalling your words, your voice.

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Alev Adil
Anglophone Cypriot poet, performance artist, and academic who has been included in more than 10 anthologies of Cypriot poetry in English, Greek and Turkish and has been translated into eight languages. Alev has performed in London including the Queen’s House at the Maritime Museum, the British Museum, Tate Britain, and internationally from Finland to Australia. Alev has a PhD from Central Saint Martin’s, University of the Arts, London, and extensive experience of teaching art and literature at BA and MA level in universities in the UK and as a visiting professor in Cyprus, Greece, Holland, Trinidad, and India. Contact: alev.adil@gmail.com