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This series of images focuses on the complicated and unnerving relationship between surveillance and the Cypriot landscape. As such, ISLANDLISTENING centers around the vast amounts of data collection, espionage, and information gathering that occurs in Cyprus, a global and important information hub, in order not only to unveil the extent of military and commercial usage of Cyprus’s landscape for imperialist and corporate gain, but also to unsettle the historic notion of landscape imagery in Cyprus as idyllic. In so doing, ISLANDLISTENING considers how landscape photographs can themselves become data, utilized as formal, informal, or even unwitting records of reconnaissance.
In this vein, Artemis engages with a history of photography in Cyprus purposed for colonial, military, and trade intelligence that dates as far back as the late-nineteenth century. Landscape imagery’s long use for and by colonial hegemony, where Cyprus was often presented as an unspoiled halcyon which was nonetheless indebted to Britain, centers landscape itself as a significant, if subtle, agent in how information and data is interpreted about the country. ISLANDLISTENING visually responds to this incongruity, so that often a romantic arcadia provides the photographs’ conceptual framing, destabilizing the viewer’s expectations further when apparati of data collection become apparent in the depths of some of the images. Consequently Artemis reappraises how the series’ photographs are also data vessels, and in collaboration with text written by Alexandra Manglis, leaves the viewer to extrapolate possible narratives from the information provided in the photographs and from the epistolary scrawls written below them.
- Alexandra Manglis is a writer, editor, and academic. Her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Wave Composition, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Oxonian.