Dandilands
by pick nick

This publication is the unfolding of the first part of Dandilands, an art project in collaboration with visual artists, Marc Bijl, Mustafa Hulusi, Mahony, Jumana Manna, Michelle Padeli, Liliana Porter, Kevin Schmidt, Socratis Socratous, Kostis Velonis, and Carla Zaccagnini, which took place between autumn of 2014-15. A random audience could walk along a circular trail of 7km through a rocky path overlooking wild trees with a view beyond the forest and over the island of Cyprus, and come into contact with a standing sign exhibiting the artists’ work. A sign as both site and object; a place of intention and image; a setting of the social.

The publication Dandilands grew out of an eagerness to place together, in sync and out, a selection of writers with diverging fields on intimacy and space, which critique regimes of power and normalisation integrated in urban and rural patterns. It was envisioned at the intersection of visual and performance arts and poetry, cultural theory and critical perspectives on human rights, historiography, social anthropology and gender queer activism. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and scholarly repositories, these essayists enter a liberating space where ways of seeing and (un)knowing are recognized as contestable sites.

The contributing writers, researchers and scholars are Alev Adil, Guilherme Altmayer, Antonis Hadjikyriacou, Sophie Houdart, Sophia Lemos, and the collective, The Jerusalem Of Things (Emilio Distretti, Bana Abu Zuluf, Jamal Abu Eisheh, and Shahd Qannam). Each walks through their essay, treading critically through spatial and syntactical arrangements as their research practice, social positioning, and life experience moves them, and us. Dandilands wishes to contribute to a continued lively discussion-action around public practices and those rampantly increasing and demarcated borders-spaces, and by so doing, to foster ways of trespassing authoritative space and historical narratives that normalise exclusion and tend exclusivity.