Drifting in the Dead Zone in Cyprus: the mediation of memory through expanded life writing

Nicosia, a medieval walled city in Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964 and remains the last divided capital city in Europe. This thesis deploys poesis and performance to interrogate the border as a site of reminiscence at the intersection of multiple and contested collective memory-narratives. In order to explore the nature of individual and collective memory the thesis challenges a series of physical and conceptual border zones: the disciplinary and discursive boundaries between poetry and philosophy; the border between memory and identity; the border between collective and individual memory and the physical terrain of the border that divides Nicosia.

The dérive, translocated from Paris to Nicosia, is used to explore these borders through an autoethnographic poetics that crosses the fields of poetry, anthropology and art practice. Walking and the practice arising from it speak back to the border. The connections between poetry, performance, collective memories and mediated subjectivities are investigated through a multimedia totality of poetics that deploys film, photography and live performance as well as writing. The thesis consists of this written exegesis and documentation of the performance Memory in the Dead Zone, the website MemoryMap, the film-poem DVD An Architecture of Forgetting and The Archive of Lost Objects, a book of poetry and photography. This multimedia collection seeks to capture the complexity, diversity and fluidity of the phenomenological experience of memory and subjectivity. This thesis proposes and identifies a field of expanded life writing that is distinct from but related in ethos to the category of expanded cinema, to define such practice. The knowledge that arises out of the dérives is represented in a thesis that attempts to capture the multiplicity (though not the totality) and interrelationships of the discourses and practices that inform my border memories.