Startup seconds: Dimitris Chimonas

Dimitris Chimonas interviewed by Stella Mastorosteriou

Where The Sun Never Sets took place as a 12-hour event on 20 July at the Rock of Chasamboulion, an impressive natural environment in the south of Cyprus, with a lot of historical connotations. In our second talk, curator Dimitris Chimonas reflects on the unfolding of the day and the process leading up to it.

Workshopping and preparation

One of Chimonas’ initial aims for this project was to build a community of artists who would exchange and create together. Leading up to the public event, the group of 16 Cypriot artists from both sides of the border camped together in the countryside and went into workshop mode: “Everybody was very curious, very warm and giving to the process,” says Chimonas. “Some things were predecided, but more ideas kept coming through conversation. We worked during the day and observed the environment and the dramaturgy of the sun, of the weather, of the place… We also took a field trip to Agia Napa, one of the most touristy towns in Cyprus, where UK garage music grew its roots intertwined with the local mafia and extreme-right politics. We had a lot of fun doing social experiments and observing the tourist product of Cyprus, this artificial façade where you can watch the ghost city of Ammochostos through binoculars next to drunk tourists partying.”

This year, 20 July marked fifty years since the division of the island in 1974, and the conception of the event revolves around this anniversary while taking a critical distance from the ways it is commemorated.

“An idea that stood out was that of a school commemoration. Since schools are closed for summer, there are no staged commemorations of this day at school, as usually happen for other national anniversaries. So, we started creating our own ‘school show’, working on its semiotics. It begins with a speech, there is a narrator, then follows a recital of poems, a choir, and at the end there is the most entertaining part, the dance and the instrumentals.”

“We used this to create a structure for the day, a script, which we also printed and hung on the trees for the audience to know what was going to happen. Some ‘rules’ were that no one would be timekeeping except those responsible for this, and that we didn’t have to stick to the plan. It was just a suggestion of a score, things might just happen… and they did.”

A day to be experienced

WTSNS was essentially an invitation to comemmorate this significant day on reimagined terms, in nature. Upon booking their ticket, the audience was informed of the place, and that they could come and go as they wished. They were also encouraged to bring waterproof shoes and stuff for a picnic. Around 100 hundred people, including some from the north side of the divide, gathered throughout the day. “The place is a two-hour drive from Nicosia, so it was quite a big deal for people to come.”

Chimonas maps out the flow of the day consisting of various ‘happenings’, blending into one another and inviting the audience to participate: a collective yoga practice, vocal exercises, a choir, a group reading of Margarita Karapanou’s book The Sleepwalker, one of the initial references for the event’s conception. “We hadn’t decided exactly how we would do it – and it ended with everybody in the water, reading from scattered pieces of paper!” A quiet siesta time at noon, with DJ mixes of soundscapes, collective exercises of active resting and massages for the audience, card readings in Turkish, followed by an aimless hike in the forest and screaming acts. “Everybody was screaming under the burning sun,” Chimonas explains – a parallel to the sirens buzzing throughout the country that same day.

“After this point, we had all tuned together, so things started happening more intuitively.” Emiddio Vaszquez did a sound performance in the water, a live remix of a garage song written in Cyprus. Panos Malactos performed a gogo-boy dance with more people joining him. This became the introduction to Fatigue, Viktor Szeri’s Aerowaves 2023 piece, which is the other central reference of the project. A DJ set by Stanley Maneuver (András Molnar) lured the audience onto a fast-paced dancefloor with a smoke machine where everybody was dancing. “At the peak of the party, we started performing Fatigue. Nobody questioned it, everybody joined us in this slow-motion reggaeton dancing, which lasted 45 minutes. This was the peak of the day. I feel that everything I read in Viktor’s piece was realized at this point, very organically. It is not something that I can describe, it is something that you had to experience. It was not to be watched – you had to get lost in this cloud of slowness, where things were emerging. For me, the essence of the piece was in being part of it. It was orgiastic and shocking in a way. We finished in silence and stillness, with a sense of catharsis. It felt like screaming but in total silence.”

The final chapter was a light installation in the forest, activating the landscape. “We did some final vocalisations and readings from the book.” At 10 o’clock, one last text was read, drawing the lines connecting us, in Cyprus, with Gaza.

After-party plans and reflections

“The following days we needed some recovery time to understand what happened. It was hard to part ways,” Chimonas recalls. A printed publication documenting the day is in progress, along with the discussions for the last part of the project: Emiddio Vasquez, Kris Adem and Seta Astreou Karides are working on the production of short videoworks to be screened at the Queer Wave LGBTQIA + Film Festival in Nicosia. “We will all meet again for the screenings on 21 September, where we will also do a round table discussion on the whole project.”

Reflecting on his initial objectives for the project, Chimonas pinpoints two main parameters: “On the one hand it is important for me that in these times of financial instability and stress, the participant artists had some income during the summer period. On the other hand, I am interested in this format of a ‘happening’, of setting the space and the time and giving value to what occurs. I feel that we took a deep dive in this direction. I find what happened there very essential, almost like a remedy to the times we live in. It was something that needed to be experienced and I find that very crucial. In our discussions we avoided the term improvisation and used the term play instead – there is more openness to it and we found it politically interesting that it is not easy to define. It could be everything, but is also nothing. It could be serious, but also very funny…” To quote the curatorial text for WTSNS itself: The question is not “what” but rather “when” and “where”.