This landscape diminishes fast –even before the foundation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960– leaving behind and bequeathing a sense of desolation, deconstruction and desertion.  This almost vacant habitat in the Old Town emerges as the echo of a bygone societal and cultural reality. Trails of Memories negotiates notions of archaeology, historical consciousness, personal and collective memory, human geography, gender relations, transition, abandonment and unavoidable evolution.

The project will interface multiple scopes of memory through the experimentation of choreographer Arianna Economou and her team with space but concurrently activating the personal memories of inhabitants who lived and continue to live in the area of old Pafos. The inactive townhouses of the area (and also those that today are being re-used for other purposes such as restaurants, etc.) represent the memory that has uncontrollably began to be superseded by an ideological as well as a diverse economical status quo, while at the same time the semi-derelict buildings stand like vanishing traces desperately declaring “we were also here”. The conceptual mapping of the history of Pafos’ city centre expresses a wider phenomenon –a praxis of transition– also found in innumerable other urban city centres on an international scale which experience the same transition of historical memory and a flux towards something new. This is an ambivalent evolution process that leads to an amalgamation of generations, history, culture, ideology and dialectical materialism.

An exhibition with archival and audiovisual material (written texts, photographs, recorded narrations) at the Pafos Municipal Gallery (27 October – 11 November) will coincide with the previous events and will take visitors on a journey in space and time. Three solo performances by Arianna Economou taking place at the same venue (4, 7, 11 November) will investigate through her underlying interactive relationship with the exhibited material her own personal experiential memory.