Abstract
Cypriot ideological frameworks have, for a long time, been characterised by ethnic-nationalist hegemonies, that even now have not disappeared. These discourses articulated the other community as enemy, emphasising their evilness, in their being responsible for the death and destruction on the island during the second half of the 20th century.
At the same time, in these discourses, the goodness of the self is highlighted by the emphasis on the sacrifice of heroes, and the righteousness of the cause, whether this was enosis or taksim, or yet another political strategy (Michael, 2011; Bryant and Papadakis, 2012). These discourses on the self (and the enemy) became materialised in a large amount of statutes, commemorating actors or events from the different periods of conflict.
In the case of the southern part of the island, Karaiskou (2013; 2014) counted more than 600 of them, many of which were representing individuals. Most of these statues were well-aligned with the discursive hegemonies on the self, commemorating those killed in action or missing, celebrating victories, leaders and heroes, and indirectly signifying the evilness of the perpetrators.
But at the same time, the (south) Cypriot landscape is vast and virtually impossible to control, which has implied that also statues have been erected that contradict and disrupt the hegemonic discourses. In their materiality, they form permanent dislocations of the hegemonic discourses on the self and other, and a support for alternative or counter-hegemonic discourses.
This chapter is theoretically driven by discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) and grounded in a one-year long ethnography on Cyprus, where four months were spent on researching a series of monuments in the south of Cyprus, supported by the Public Art in Cyprus database. It will combine elements of visual sociology (in its reliance on photography) and traditional academic writing, firstly, in analysing how the memorials serve the hegemonic discourses of suffering and heroism, in some cases (the independence war) leading to closure, in other cases (the later conflict(s)) remaining open-ended.
In a second part, it will focus on those monuments that dislocate hegemonic discourses, by stressing reconciliation (in past and present), by bringing otherness to the Greek-Cypriot space, and by bringing diversity to this space. The chapter will show that, despite these dissonances being discursified and discursive struggles being waged, in attempts to protect the hegemonies, the materiality of these statues produces permanent dislocations.