Book – Books – Books on Cyprus

Stitching the Buffer Zone

A very new book on a long term collective initiative

By the authors: Anna Grichting Solder, Maria Costi de Castrillo, Stephanie Keszi and Georgia Frangoudi 

By Heidi Trautmann

I have met Anna Grichting on many occasions, mostly at vernissages of exhibitions or panel discussions and lectures concerning Nicosia and the buffer zone. She is an architect and urbanist, active in the academic and professional fields, with experience in research, teaching, and project design and management. She holds a Doctor of Design in Urbanism from Harvard University, as well as a Diploma of Advanced Studies in Urbanism and Territorial Planning and a Diploma of Architecture from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. A Swiss national, she has lived and studied in England, Ireland, Switzerland and the USA, practicing architecture and urbanism in Switzerland, and conducting research and projects with international scholars and institutions in the USA, Switzerland, Cyprus, Korea, United Kingdom and elsewhere. She is particularly interested in ecological planning and landscape urbanism, in linear territories of division and their future transformations as biological and cultural landscapes of memory and reconciliation.

Her interest in Cyprus is the rather wide band of unspoilt nature, the buffer zone, running through Nicosia, through the whole island. In the years passed nature had the chance to get its way without any interference of humans and I have heard saying from insiders that flora and fauna have redeveloped species in all quietness that haven’t been seen for a long time.

Anna Grichting was concerned about this very space, especially between the two Nicosias, and she called the collective initiative she was part of “Stitching the Buffer Zone”.

Now she has informed me that the collective work over the last years has finally been published and I think it is a very important document to see how things could be handled in case of Day X.

Please read the product description of the book:

Stitching the Buffer Zone is a collective initiative which aims to build up an open platform of interaction and exchange on the issue of the Cyprus Buffer Zone. By means of exhibitions, presentations, and/or public interventions, in Cyprus and abroad, Stitching the Buffer Zone is an ongoing open call to artists, activists, architects, urban planners, and researchers to question, reformulate and contest prevailing norms and ideologies concerning this spatial strip which is still excluded from everyday experience. In doing so, these events and collaborations aim to shift perspective, and, thus, to create new meanings, experiences, understandings, relationships and situations. Contents: Project 1: The GreenLineScapes Laboratory seeks to initiate healing ecologies in the physical and psychological rift of the Cyprus Buffer Zone - where the untamed forces of Nature have engendered a spontaneous process of cicatrisation - and suggests the opportunity to create a beautiful scar through the creation of an ecological landscape of memory. [A. Grichting Solder] Project 2: The Stitches - Connecting the two Nicosias again proposes a functional stitch aiming at recreating the broken threads of the City. Sound becomes a tool in urban context, promoting revival through encounter. Creating common experience aims at surpassing this zone of prohibition, remaining in space not only as an urban gap but also a gap in the memory of the city. It aims at challenging more stitches to occur. [M. Costi de Castrillo] Project 3: Trans_experiences aim to invent mechanisms that transfer the experience of the buffer zone in to a real space, in order to redefine the perception of the boundary and to generate new spatial connections and transmutations. Through transient interventions, different elements are assimilated, intermingled and transformed, leading to a new 'crossing experience'. [S. Keszi & G. Frangoudi] contact: stitchingthebufferzone@gmail.com, +35799523715

Stitching the Buffer Zone - Stitching the Buffer Zone

Landscapes, Sounds and Trans_Experiences along the Cyprus Green Line. [Paperback]