Ghost in the Vitrine

Alexandros sends me a message from the Cyprus Museum, attaching a photograph of a display cabinet. It holds no objects, only discoloured stains left behind on blue fabric lining in the shape of holes, a negative index of what it had once contained. At the time, our conversations in Endrosia Collective were focused on constructing the speculative shell agency, Forever Informed, which would eventually become the façade of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. A parafictional surveillance company in disarray, Forever Informed gave expression to the elusive and Promethean ambitions for a quantifiable future and a hubristic pursuit for information power.1

The ever-pervasive traces of intercommunal conflict, as well as the historical legacies and infrastructures of militarisation and intelligence gathering that have instrumentalised Cyprus as Britain’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, made the display cabinet’s particular incantation of absence enticing to think about.2On this geopolitical battleground, where coloniality remains dominant while evading perception, a well-fed, fertile Lernaean Hydra rears a number of its regenerative heads: from the resurgence of ethno-nationalisms and ethno-nihilisms, to the island’s embroilment and complicity in genocidal violence.3 The near-total destruction of Gaza has been a raging fire close enough to these shores that the ashes settle on the hands of those around us, while the island itself returns the gaze of those who imagine themselves as distant witnesses to a regional violence that the island has materially enabled. We are left before an opaque mirror where absence thickens into image, refusing to release the gaze from its burden, reflecting back proximity without granting it legibility.

Approaching this tension between absence, reflection, and (in)visibility through the prism of an empty display cabinet left us with a slippery reliance on the power of suggestion alone. A vacant vitrine does not itself contain meaning, but reflects our own inquisitive gaze back upon itself, like a signal bouncing back to its sender. As a metaphor, it evoked Yves Klein’s singular empty vitrine presented in the 1958 exhibition Le Vide: a primary example of modern art’s pursuit of immateriality and emptiness as pure, transcendental abstraction; Taoist nothingness as exquisite plenitude, as liberation from matter.

The absence that we were drawn to had spiritually similar qualities to the unphotographed image that haunts Marguerite Duras in her 1984 novel The Lover: an almost mythical non-image embodying emotional truth rather than historical accuracy. In the opening chapter of the book, a photograph depicting the narrator as a young girl crossing the Mekong River is described in perfect detail, only for a confession to arrive that: ‘The image doesn’t exist. It was omitted. Forgotten ... And it’s to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute.’4Absence becomes the condition allowing the image to exist at all: it is contradictory, present yet inaccessible, a hole implying a ‘could-have-been’, rather than the ‘has-been’ that Roland Barthes characterised as the essence of the photographic image – an intimation of a counterfactual world of desire residing in the gaps between images.

The speculative disaster that romantically washes history away in Mustafa Hulusi’s two-channel video installation The Empty Near East (2011) imagines such a gap so that the land can breathe a sigh of relief. The artist captures an unfettered Cypriot landscape in a free-flowing, perpetual present of post-historical placidity as a meditation on how the region is imagined, emptied, and reconstituted through Western desire, capital, and spectacle. Nature eclipses history as the island is left to its own devices, silence touching everything in its turn, ‘and in its way, and that was all’.5

Yet the vistas of the Karpas Peninsula, idyllic but lying fallow, are palpably haunted by a pervasive without-ness, by traces of the images that could have been.

What force is exerted by absence, when the image bends back upon itself? In her poem, ‘My Darling Clementine’, Ioulita Toumazi writes: ‘I had a childhood of forbidden orange trees / remembered from a life that wasn’t mine.’6 This forbidden memory is something we share: our grandmothers’ recollections of Varosha, the town of oranges and windmills, are ours and not ours. The seaside ghost town that they were displaced from is an image that for us is blurred, faded, corrupted.7Language and sight are apart, so the ‘absolute image’ is necessarily absent, detached from explanation, unbound from continuity, impossible. It is an impossible language too, for to speak about this site of overlapping and suspended narratives in words that resist co-optation is Sisyphean and at odds with our need to create a memory of the future; a future that must be made in the very gaps where images refuse completion; where memory, history, and desire converge – not to be understood but held.

And so we bend the eye towards vacancy: a glance might just be able to cast a light that causes the holes on the fabric within the vitrine to shift and widen. These image holes, through lack and incompleteness, communicate to an underworld that whispers back, an exchange coming together in a series of covert messages converging in a light that refuses capture.