ORCID

Abstract

Published in the first study on empty places in photography and the Covid-19 pandemic, Parker’s chapter examines the cinematographic depiction of ‘emptiness’ in the author’s site-specific essay film, Father-land (2018), made collaboratively with the film-maker Stuart Moore through an artists’ research residency in Nicosia, the only divided capital city in Europe. It details the process-based research methods that led to Father-land’s affective depiction of the politically-charged, ‘empty landscape’ of the Nicosia Buffer Zone, the demilitarized strip of land monitored by the United Nations, which has separated the Greek Cypriot south of Cyprus from the Turkish-occupied north since the violent conflict of 1974.The reflective analysis details how the film-making research was led by Parker and Moore’s day-to-day lived experience of living next to this ‘empty zone’, informed by their extensive engagement with the local population and surveys of the fractured built environment, and inflected by their memories as ‘Forces children’ whose fathers were military personnel on the island during the Cold War.The chapter thus extends understanding of the human impacts of separation, uncertain displacement and legacies of trauma, and brings emptiness into interdisciplinary focus as an object of study that extends beyond the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Publication Date

2023-09-27

Publication Title

Watching, Waiting: The Photographic Representation of Empty Places

ISBN

9789461665195

Embargo Period

2024-03-12

Keywords

Buffer Zone, childhood, conflict, Cyprus, memory, postcolonial, essay film, film-making, Nicosia, place, separation

First Page

33

Last Page

62

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10.11116/9789461665195" data-hide-no-mentions="true">

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