Multimedia exhibit in the context of the workshop “Landscapes of Leisure: Architectural Histories of Tourism and Development”
June 5th 2018 at the Peace Room (62 Ledras street – Nicosia)
In 1962, Cyprus has its picture taken. Urbanist Eugene Beaudouin, architect and urbanist Manuel Baud-Bovy and architect Aristea Rita Tzanos comprise the group of French consultants that extensively photograph the Cypriot landscape. The team was invited by the nascent Republic of Cyprus to produce a report on the island’s future in the emerging industry of tourism. Their photographic lens highlights the island’s “unspoiled”coastal landscape as the quintessential tourist asset.
The pursue of the “unspoiled” as a characteristic of the Mediterranean landscape internalizes a contradiction: If on the one hand an idealized “unspoiled” Mediterranean coastline entailed emancipatory aspirations for the North European urbanite, as it was associated with the qualities of a “pre-urban” and “non-urban” lifestyle; on the other hand, the processes of urbanization unleashed by the pursuit of the “unspoiled” as an asset for the emerging tourist industry, paradoxically eradicated these qualities from the produced landscapes, the latters being shaped instead by processes of relentless real estate speculation.
Famagusta’s leisurescape exemplifies this contradiction. Featuring as one of Cyprus’s unspoiled beaches in the French photographic collection, Famagusta’s Golden Coast becomes, less than a decade later, the country’s flagship leisurescape, catering to half of the island’s mass-tourism flows.Far from the 1962 Edenic visions captured by the photographic lens of the French team, the pictures of the 1970s Famagusta depict a coastal landscape densely constructed with hotels that offered all the amenities of modern urban life for the European and North American tourist. The remarkable transformations of the Golden Coast during the period of 1960 - 1974 make visible this often-concealed aspect of landscapes of leisure as operational landscapes of a post-Fordist economy. Moreover, and as they increasingly became part of the government’s agendas for economic development during the 1960s and early 70s, these developmental landscapes also embody various forms of politics, inequality and dispossession. Or even, they become spaces of contestation and conflict, despite the iconography of relaxation portrayed in promotion pamphlets and newspaper articles in Cyprus and internationally.
The multimedia exhibit titled “The Constructed and the Unspoiled” curated by the Mesarch Lab team is a reflection on these thoguhts. The exhibit attempted a synthesis of photographic content from the two archives mentioned above (the Beaudouin - Baud-Bovy – Tzanos photographic collection hosted at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation and the Press Information Office of the Republic of Cyprus photo archives of the period 1960-1974) in conversation with other archival material (architectural models and publications). The parallel display of what was envisioned (extrapolating from the perspectives introduced by the French photo archive) and what was constructed until the early 70s (documented in the various photographic collections of the Press Information Office) aimed to highlight precisely this contradictory nature of the landscapes of leisure: as both developmental landscapes and as spaces permeated by utopian aspirations.
The Mesarch Lab is grateful to the Press Information Office of the Republic of Cyprus and the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, for offering access to their archival material. Special thanks to Dr Ioanna Hadjicosti, Director of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation and Dr Christodoulos Hadjichristodoulou, Director of the Bank of Cyprus Historical Archive, for their engagement and interest in our research work.
Archival Research: Dimitris Venizelos
Curators: Dimitris Venizelos, Panayiota Pyla, Petros Phokaides
Assistant curator: Michalis Psaras
References
Gaviria, Mario. “La producción neocolonialista del espacio.” Papers. Revista de Sociologia3, (July 1, 1974): 201–17.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991: chapters 4-6
Lefebvre, Henri. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Libro negro sobre la autopista de la Costa Blanca, ed. Mario Gaviria (Valencia: Editorial Cosmos, 1973), xiii–xiv.
Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Republic of Cyprus, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, French Republic—Eugene Beaudouin, Manuel Baud- Bovy, Aristea Rita Tzanos. Cyprus Study of Tourist Development. 1962.
Raymond, Henri. “Le littoral et l’usager.” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, no. 175 (1974): 28.
Raymond, Henri. Les significations culturelles du littoral français. Institut d’Etudes et de Recherches en Architecture et Urbanisme, 1973.
Raymond, Henri. “Le littoral et l’usager.” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, no. 175 (1974): 28.
LEGEND
L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, no. 175 (1974): 28
Review of foreign and national newspapers on Hotel developments in Cyprus (Mesarch Lab working documents)
Original Model of Golden Sands Hotel by Garnett-Cloughley-Blakemore Architects. Donated to Mesarch Lab by Derry Garnett
“Microcosms”, Mesarch Lab working documents
The Golden Sands hotel Promotional video from Golden Sands hotel opening on 7 July 1973, Patrick Garnett’s archive, Mpeg video, 17:26
Photographs of Famagusta’s leisure strip – content from various photographic collections of the Press Information Office of the Republic of Cyprus
Photographs of the Beaudouin-Bovy-Tzanos archive, hosted at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation.
Workshop presentations
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