The interdisciplinary research group Space of Tapes presents the collaborative audiovisual performance installation piece, The Cartographer and Her Chorus: a dreamscape monodrama involving five artists from Cyprus, Greece, and Spain.

 

Taking dream incubation rituals as a starting point, this work maps performative bodies within a topography of sculptures, video projections, soundscapes, and live music. Dream incubation rituals, practiced by many ancient cultures, refer to the practice of sleeping in a sacred precinct to intentionally experience and nurture a divinely inspired dream, often associated with healing or prophecy.

 

During a four-week research residency, the Nicosia Buffer Zone operated as the alchemical site for a modern incubation, inviting the artists to engage and be engaged in the liminal space of a zone -a crack. Bayo Akomolafe, philosopher, and author, defines cracks as <<reformulations of presence, territorial materializations of dense ontological flows. Desirous flows in immanent fields of becoming>>. 

 

Dream images served as subtle invitations to navigate through this scenic zone, and listen beyond oneself, entering a collective space where things can die and provide energy or compost, for transformation. The world of images becomes the essential component of a place-making ritual where every point is a leap into a re-articulation of the self. 

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Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker" serves as a mythological stratum, a cartography of a metaphysical journey into the heart of the Zone -a place rumored to fulfill one's deepest desires, and a canvas for the projection of internal images that metabolise into reality. 

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The chimeric forms of the sculptures of Simis Soukiouroglou, created in the Buffer Zone, and collected from the Athalassa area, once part of the deep sea, create a strong metaphor for the world of images emerging from the unsconcious.