Separation Anxiety: Filming the Nicosia Buffer Zone

Abstract

The chapter explores the politics of emptiness through the 20-minute essay film, Father-land (2018), made collaboratively by the authors, Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker, through an artist research residency hosted by the Nicosia Municipal Arts centre (NiMAC) in Cyprus. The story of Nicosia itself unfolds through a montage of views of the fractured landscape of the Buffer Zone and its accompanying ambient soundscape, while the voices of two unseen narrators share their childhood recollections and reflect on im- ages of conflict and the legacies of colonialism, occupation, and the Cold War.

The film interweaves our personal memories as children, growing up with fathers who served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) on the island, with our lived experience of present-day Nicosia, as we explored the suspended animation of the politically charged Buffer Zone, the demilitarised strip of land controlled by the United Nations that has partitioned Cyprus from east to west since the military conflict of 1974. Our principal residency period was for four weeks in November and December 2016. This followed the ‘Brexit’ referendum on 23 June 2016, when the UK voted to leave the European Union. For us, our imminent – and unwelcome – isolation from the continent of Europe and England’s resurgent nationalistic ideology resonated with our childhood memories of separation and displacement, living in temporary homes in various RAF camps, and our day-to-day experience as temporary residents of Nicosia, the only divided capital city in Europe. We returned for a second, week-long residency period in spring 2018 to record additional locations, sound, and the narration for the film. Father-land was exhibited at NiMAC, close to where the film was made. Father-land creates an autoethnographic memory archive that brings together the personal and the political in our post-Brexit and increasingly unstable times.