Trapped in Wordscapes and Staged Territories

We kept walking through the beautiful city in our minds saying, Stay, thou art so fair, but the city did not comply. We walked and walked through the city in our minds infecting and healing ourselves at the same time, infecting and healing, infecting and healing, until it was impossible to tell the difference, until we were totally infected, and totally healed: But as soon as we left the city in our minds to come back to this city, we knew that the healing was temporary, and the infection forever. — Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia 15

The extraordinary changes in Cyprus's urban landscape over the past few years are being increasingly felt in our bodies as we move through public space, taking in images and sounds and processing all that is shifting.

Τrapped in Wordscapes and Staged Territories is designed around the reciprocal act of speaking and being heard. The artist uses an artificial wax ear and invites visitors to privately share their thoughts about the city of Lemesos. The ear, as the main character, hosts a poetry evening during which changing cityscapes and themes of belonging are explored through the work of award-winning writer Donna Stonecipher.

Processes of gentrification across the globe are often described as neo-colonial practices. Locally, they are discussed almost exclusively in economic terms, framed through the glorifying neoliberal vocabulary of real estate. Words like ‘growth’ and ‘development’ have dominated the mainstream and limited how these phenomena are perceived. As a result, our understanding of political processes of displacement linked to gentrification is very limited. By accepting these definitions and reducing the vocabulary used to describe them, our perception of how we can respond significantly shrinks.

Reading together and sharing thoughts and experiences enables us to connect. We become aware of how the transformations around us extend into embodied individual cities in the form of personal memories, miles walked, and things said in the place called home. Through the medium of poetry, we are able to form non-linear articulations of what we are witnessing and digesting, going from ‘looking at’ to ‘looking after’.

To put things in our own words is to include ourselves in the conversation, the landscape, urban consciousness, and future history records; it is an exercise in sense-making away from established jargon.

The poetry session is organised in the framework of The Right to Home: Diaries of Limassol’s Gentrification [LINK], a group exhibition and events programme presented by The Island Club and curated by Androula Kafa.

Aggela Ioannidou

Aggela Ioannidou is a Cypriot visual artist and performance-maker. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Kent, UK, and an MSc in Art History from the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her practice integrates documentation, intervention, and humour, designing participatory collaborative learning activities and devised rituals. She has exhibited in Cyprus and abroad, most recently presenting her ongoing project West Limassol Diaries as part of the exhibition Designing Disobedience (2025) at NeMe Arts Centre, Cyprus.