Thinking With Stones

Decolonising the culture-scape of drystone heritage

Abstract

It is late February 2025, and the short, cold, dry spell masks the fact that winter on the island of Cyprus has passed us by. I have been watering my plants since January, sparingly, with guilt, amidst news that Limassol’s main Alassa dam has run dry; the Charokokolymbos dam in rural Paphos has also suffered, affecting nearby banana plantations, after it was emptied into the sea having developed alarming structural cracks. There was also an accidental fire at Paphos’s desalination plant; or illegal siphoning of water downstream from Pera Pedi dam, by the private encroaching Land of Dreams retreat. Some decades ago, planners decided that tenacious terraced communities along the Diarizos river had no future, so their water rights were diverted to elite, privileged tourism industries and intensive agrarian development in the island’s east. Now, coastal tourism communities are refusing desalination plants close to the beaches they rely on for revenue. Such extractive water-affected infrastructures which have commodified water to extremes, hint at, but also affect the disappearance of water.  Our-as yet- running taps and plastic-bottled water cocoon us from this impending reality.

Entangling intimate experiences and concerns about the drystone terraced landscape, I try to de-center top-down approaches by examining how architecture today impacts this largely left-over landscape body, questioning how the profession has become one of the most extractive, irreversibly burdening the environment. By juxtaposing the small-scale onto a territorial scale, insights into drawing the larger political picture are revealed. What constitutes impact or value when a project ‘words’ itself into its own epistemic frame, entangled with but not contained by disciplinary norms? [1]

[1]This text derives from research prepared for an exhibition and a catalogue, co-curated for the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2025, 19^th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia by the author. The exhibition presented drystone heritage through its affects of ‘land as landscape’, while the multi-authored catalogue explored ‘land as language’.   One month after its release, the catalogue was officially banned by the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture, following a presidential order, which censored the work for not adhering to the “official political narrative”, and for including the two Cypriot dialects instead of modern Greek; despite the fact that freedom of speech is enshrined in the Cyprus constitution. The writers and publishers did not accept the censorship and the catalogue sold out. Opinions, mistakes or positions cited here are solely those of the author, adhering as close as possible to personal experiences and do not reflect official political positions and opinions of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC).