Trails of Memories | curator: Dr Kostas Prapoglou

About

Choreographer / Director / Dramaturgy / Music Supervisor: Arianna Economou

Curator & Artistic Consultant: Dr Kostas Prapoglou

Trails of Memories is a cross-disciplinary and manifold survey focusing on the part of the city that is situated between the Municipal Gardens and Moussallas, a district that during the early 20th century became Paphos’ epicentre of immense urban landscape development. This landscape diminishes fast –even before the foundation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960– leaving behind and bequeathing a sense of desolation, deconstruction and desertion.   

This almost vacant habitat in the Old Town emerges as the echo of a bygone societal and cultural reality. Trails of Memories negotiates notions of archaeology, historical consciousness, personal and collective memory, human geography, gender relations, transition, abandonment and unavoidable evolution.

The project will interface multiple scopes of memory through the experimentation of choreographer Arianna Economou and her team with space but concurrently activating the personal memories of inhabitants who lived and continue to live in the area of old Paphos. The inactive townhouses of the area (and also those that today are being re-used for other purposes such as restaurants, etc.) represent the memory that has uncontrollably began to be superseded by an ideological as well as a diverse economical status quo, while at the same time the semi-derelict buildings stand like vanishing traces desperately declaring “we were also here”. The conceptual mapping of the history of Paphos’ city centre expresses a wider phenomenon –a praxis of transition– also found in innumerable other urban city centres on an international scale which experience the same transition of historical memory and a flux towards something new. This is an ambivalent evolution process that leads to an amalgamation of generations, history, culture, ideology and dialectical materialism.

Trails of Memories will interconnect the audience of the Cultural Capital of Paphos with the public space of the Old Town through three site-specific performances (21, 25, 27 October) at the Ethnographical Museum and a number of abandoned spaces around it as well as the Metropolis of Paphos.

An exhibition with archival and audiovisual material (written texts, photographs, recorded narrations) at the Pafos Municipal Gallery (27 October – 11 November) will coincide with the previous events and will take visitors on a journey in space and time. Three solo performances by Arianna Economou taking place at the same venue (4, 7, 11 November) will investigate through her underlying interactive relationship with the exhibited material her own personal experiential memory.

This project has been approved within the framework of TERPSICHORE 2017 programme of the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture and is part of the official programme of the Cultural Capital PAFOS 2017.