A fractured face hangs on a wall in Nicosia, echoing the scars of the buffer zone. Photograph by Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, August 2024. Nicosia, Cyprus.  

Fluid Territories: On Spatial Relations and the Politics of Crossing in Nicosia, Cyprus

Mahsa Alami Fariman

Ahmadreza Hakiminejad

This work will be presented at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2025, as part of the panel Thriving on Ambiguity: Interstices as Urban Emergence, convened by Richard Muller and Varvara Karipidou of the University College London. 

Date: 29 August 2025

Time: 14:40 - 16:20 BST

Location: University of Birmingham | Teaching and Learning Building: Room LG03 

SYNOPSIS

Located at the centre of the system rather than on the periphery and the margin, Nicosia’s buffer zone is a boundary where its ‘incapacity to habitat’ unfolds multiplicity of possibilities and stresses a distributed agency among bodies, things and spaces. Challenging the modern assumption of dual categories—such as the separation between us on one side and them on the other—some Cypriots use this in-between space as a dynamic sociopolitical construct to practice the multiplicity of forms of existence and to express otherwise ways of living that are intended to modify the political tensions and disturb hierarchies of the dominance. Drawing on a five-minute short film on the workshop Bridge and Door which was held inside the buffer zone in August 2024, this paper explores the fluidity of territories in the so-called no-man’s land, where the conditions of ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ separated are both contested and reformulated through spatial objects, practices, narratives, thoughts, and reflections. Emerging from complex political effects, these narratives reveal the otherwise ways of organising ‘being’ and ‘living’ within and beyond the buffer zone, challenging its existing social, political, and economic orders.

Referring to Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2014) concept of “derangement of an arrangement of existence” and considering Nicosia’s urban condition and the pressure of inequality among different bodies, ideas, and identities, this paper discusses how both humans and non-humans in the buffer zone are oriented in attempt to stabilise, hold and make sense of their lives and to imagine a possible future that supports the emergence of new, affirmative forms of life.