BUFFER FRINGE PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL:CREATING AND CURATING BEYOND THE LIMINAL FRAGILITYOF BUFFER ZONES IN CYPRUS

Abstract

The Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival was born out of the contested and fragile space in between border lines, the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. This paper will address the Festival’s enactment of a new understanding of affective space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond the liminality of a post-conflict buffer zone (in Nicosia and beyond) through the pandemic in 2020–2021, and 2022. As we will explore the Festival’s role in creating dialogue between the space and narrative layers of melancholia and nostalgia beyond the rupture that the division has produced through collaborative and process-based approaches, we will unpack the role art and co-creation can play at a moment and a space of transition to produce alternative affective agency. Within an already contested geography, 2020 brought along the pandemic and the closure of crossing points in Cyprus which paused all planned activity and demonstrated the fragility of contact between communities and artists, whilst simultaneously producing new possibilities. Buffer Fringe 2020 was one of the few artistic platforms in Cyprus and globally to have adapted and materialized a hybrid festival, while also developing interdisciplinary and innovative methodologies. Encouraging a decolonizing agenda and embedding creativity into a social process, the paper also looks into the public space intervention in the recently opened part of Famagusta in 2021, consequently touching upon the collective curatorial approach of the Festival in 2022 as embodiments of a new understanding of space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond liminal fragility.