Things the Tide Brings

The Sea Within, Limassol Municipal Arts Centre  

curated by Catherine Louis Nikita and Sylia Panayiotidou

A series of photographs depicting a once lively sea shore now permeated by ominous silence. During the months of winter hundreds of tons of seaweed are washed ashore along the coastline of Cyprus by tidal waves. Left along the seaboard for extensive periods, the dead seaweed slowly begin to pile up, accumulating formless masses that increasingly appear to alter the sight of the familiar. Things the Tide Brings explores what happens when human presence ceases to interfere, albeit temporarily, through rare glimpses of Cypriot landscapes discarded, or ,even completely obletarated in favor of immaculately clean, sunny and crowded seascapes, after these have been cleaned in time for annual tourist season. The piles of seaweed are manually loaded on municipality trucks and disposed of in publicly undisclosed ways. The project explores parallel relationships between human emotion and natural phenomena reflecting on the mutual coordinates between desolate landscape and human alienation, where suddenly foreign landscape appears as hostile threat and piles of seaweed allude to visual allegories of emotional overwhelm manifesting in physical forms.