[Un]Settled Edge

Still taken from [Un]Settled Edge

[Un]Settled Edge (2025)

This experimental piece, produced through a collaboration between Mahsa Alami Fariman, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, and Duncan Whitley, reflects on sensory encounters with the spatial dynamics of the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. Emerging from a 31-day secondment in the summer of 2024, supported by Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange (SpaceX-RISE), the work explores themes of liminality, urban interstices, and the tension between separation and connection. Funded by the Social Diversity in Planning Practice research cluster at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (UCL), the piece negotiates the politics of in-between space in the divided city through a sequence of still images, tracing the poetic and affective spatial relations that emerge within the buffer zone and along its unsettled edges.

Edit & Soundmix: Duncan Whitley
Photography: Mahsa Alami Fariman, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad
Additional Sound Recordings: Caleb Lopez, Nikos Demetriou

This work was screened on 29 August 2025, at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference, as part of the panel Thriving on Ambiguity: Interstices as Urban Emergence, convened by Richard Muller and Varvara Karipidou of the University College London. 

You can watch the full piece here.