From Cyprus With Love

Phaneromenis 70 would like to invite you to the launch of the publication titled “From Cyprus With Love”, edited by Marilena Zackheos and Kathy Kattashis. The launch will take place on the 16th of December 2016, 19:00 at Phaneromenis 70 in Nicosia.

“From Cyprus With Love” is the 11th Chapter of the ongoing Phaneromenis 70 project “Delivering Views”. The “Delivering Views” project investigates the foreign gaze by curating photographs and texts submitted to Phaneromenis 70 by visitors of Cyprus. It does so with the aim of providing new insight about visitors’ experiences of Cyprus. “From Cyprus With Love” advances this project in a different direction, pairing visual artists and creative writers—from Cyprus or associated with the island—to define Cyprus on their own terms for touristic consumption.

“From Cyprus With Love” showcases a range of contemporary islanders’ own narratives about their everyday experiences of Cyprus and attempts to shift the tourism sector’s focus to the lesser emphasized aspects of the physical and social island space, including culture, the arts, and disregarded but familiar perspectives. The publication seeks to revise colonial as well as mono-cultural representations of Cyprus that may commodify the island space and island identity for foreigners’ consumption at the expense of islanders’ dignified and diverse identities, their contemporary realities, and island ecologies.

The publication includes a set of 11 postcards and a booklet containing the curated visual and creative writing texts in English, as well as editors’ introductions. The postcards feature work by artists and writers Alev Adil, Annie Damianou, Eleni Skarpari, Charitini Kyriakou, Nikoletta Kyprianou, Maryam Roshan, Charly Chahwan, Nikandros Savvides, Mikhail Mavrotheris, Shona Muir, Christos Tsiailis, Nora Nadjarian, Polymnia Tsinti, Pavlik Frank, Andriana Ierodiaconou, Kiki Patsali, Vanessa Oberin, Alex Koumoullis-Guest, Menelaos C. Pittas, Gür Genç, Marilena Zackheos, and Kathy Kattashis.

Writer Max Sheridan and photographer Nicos Philippou will each give a brief introduction. A reception will follow.

Marilena Zackheos grew up in Moscow, Beijing, Nicosia, Geneva, and New York City. She studied philosophy, creative writing, and English literature in the USA and the UK. She holds a PhD from George Washington University, Washington D.C. She is Director of the Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies and Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia. She has published on postcolonial literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma, gender and sexuality. Her first poetry collection “Carmine Lullabies” was published by A Bookworm Publication in 2016.

Kathy Kattashis is living her own odyssey in Cyprus and believes we are all secretly trapped on the island in perpetual limbo. If she ever has to leave the island it causes her physical pain in the heart area, so she avoids it. She graduated from The Open University, UK with a degree in English Literature. She is passionate about sharks, eating a plant based diet and changing abattoir walls (at least in Cyprus) from brick to see-through glass. She currently works in the Accounting Department of a private school in Nicosia and is also finishing an MSc in Human Resource Management with The Cyprus International Institute of Management. She believes in the importance of lifelong learning and takes free online courses with Future Learn and Coursera in various subjects ranging from the life of cancer cells to introducing robotics; she wishes there was an easier way to gain knowledge and if she wasn’t on a plant based diet, she would have loved to have eaten The Salmon of Knowledge.