Here and there , October-December 2026
In a time when meaning seems to be escaping our words this co-learning assembly focuses on how we can resist these violent pulls through the act of writing, translating and publishing. Our study is grounded within the linguistic and cultural landscape of Cyprus, a historically contested space where languages and identities have intersected, collided, and evolved over centuries. The fragmented reality of language in Cyprus and the questions it raises in current political dialogue, serve as an urgent starting point for our study. What does it mean to engage with language as a political tool? Édouard Glissant’s reflections on hybridized spaces and linguistic multiplicity illuminate this inquiry. Glissant distinguishes between atavistic languages—dominant, hegemonic languages that have historically structured cultures and systems—and Creole languages, which he sees as uniquely capable of fostering solidarity. In his words:”I believe that solidarity exists between all the world’s languages, and that what is beautiful about the chaos-world… is this meeting, these bursts of light, these explosions, whose economy or principles we have not yet managed to grasp.” Expanding from Cyprus, this project considers how these “bursts of light” can foster solidarities within our immediate geography. How can we work against or with the fragmented realities of our region? How can we approach fragmentation not as a barrier, but as an opportunity for radical imagination that can generate new modes of understanding? This co-learning assembly will attempt to wrestle with these questions and more through a series of workshops, study circles, screenings, readings and other activations.
At the end of the co-learning assembly a study folder was created which gathers a selection of material from our co-learning assembly, including a reading list, texts written by the facilitators of the assemblies, exercises and conversations gathered during our journey. You can download the study folder here. We hope you will follow the trajectory of these reflections and that you’ll keep adding your own.
Facilitators: Asphalt, Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh, Sophie Fetokaki, Aphroditios, Odessa Warren, Eleni Odysseos, Miriam Gatt, Ioulita Toumazi and Seta Astreou Karides
This project is funded by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Department of Contemporary Culture, Cyprus
🌊 Co-learning assemblies are sites of collective knowledge production and transmission. They help us gather over a longer period of time to share resources gathered across our region, read, cook, listen, write, eat, study, play and think together.
Co-learning assembly program:
October 15, 6:00 pm, at Thkio Ppalies
Towards a Library of Political Friendship
with Asphalt
Join us for our first assembly led by Asphalt inviting us to think through language as a site of historical and potential geographies of shared struggle. Towards a Library of Political Friendship is an ongoing program with various iterations by Asphalt. What can the practice of translation open up across lived relations of political friendship and solidarity? How can the traditions of writing and publishing engage the continued legacies of unfinished political projects and unfulfilled desires? In what ways canlanguage mobilisethe dead – the demands of the past – as a political category for our present? Asphalt is a platform for self-organized study and publishing operating in Amman and Berlin amongst other locations.
November 5, 6:30 pm, at Thkio Ppalies
Fleeterature – On captivity and language
with Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh
For centuries, colonised people have been violently denied their ancestral languages and forced to use the languages of empire, English, French, Portuguese etc. For Chinua Achebe, the coloniser’s language was a tool to be captured, adjusted and even repurposed as a bridge connecting the anti-colonial writer to the rest of the world. For Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, those who write with the coloniser’s language are “caged within the linguistic fence of colonial inheritance” and the only true path towards decolonisation is a radical turn towards writing in our own languages.* This co-learning assembly led by Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh explores but ultimately departs from this binary. We aim to question the pre-eminence of writing as a political form and look to the spaces between the uncritical acceptance of colonial languages and the essentialising tendencies of a pure linguistic return. What can we learn from the emergence of languages like Creole, Pidgin, Patois and other forms which have emerged as necessary, life-or-death diversions from colonial subjugation? What are the flattening and transparenting forces inherent in the act of writing? What do we take for granted in the orality of language—in its capacity for change, re-invention, opacity? * Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, James Currey
November 12, 5:30 pm, location by registration
Multilingual poetics
with Sophie Fetokaki
This assembly facilitated by Sophie Fetokaki explores how poets perform hybridity and creolisation, how they expose their language to the illicit urges of the sonic, how they move obliquely and unexpectedly through semantic landscapes, voicing errant identities that can never be held in a solid form. Together we will read and listen to past and present multilingual poets, examining their approaches to the voicing of the plural self, while also carrying out some practical experiments in performative translation. Throughout, we will ask: how do multilingual poetics, with their commitment to animating the white space of the page with the collision of languages, provide a model of what it means to exist and to live across the boundaries of the word, the body, the territory, the nation? Please bring something to write with, and a text you have already written that you would like to try translating. The practical exercises can be done individually and sharing is not required. Sophie Fetokaki works across and between music, literature, performance, pedagogy, and research. Drawing from these fields and whatever else is to hand, she explores the relationships between place, identity, embodied technique, desire, and belonging.
December 21, 5:30 pm, Thkio Ppalies
On Impossible Ecologies with Odessa Warren
This study group looks at the intersection of ecology and militarism, focusing on the impact of perpetual colonial realities and counterinsurgency wars in the Eastern Mediterranean. The session draws on ongoing research inquiries and curatorial projects including War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds and the recent digital publication Dignified Life: Outliving Impossible Ecologies. The session looks at various creative practices, methodologies and spatial strategies which offer tools of intervention and resistance in cycles of mass destruction and protracted violence. In this context, the study group also discusses Cyprus as a critical site in need of emergent discursive and analytical frameworks. Odessa Warren is a Lebanese-British curator and researcher from Cyprus. She is currently Curator at Ibraaz. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. She has also worked with Beirut Art Center, The Palestinian Museum and Forensic Architecture.
November 18, 5:00 pm, Yalla
Charlouthkia-in loving memory
with Aphroditios
Join us for a presentation hosted by @APHRODITIOS — a playful delving into the complexities of the lived experiences of the diasporic Cypriot community. Within the belly of the colonising beast, Cypriots of the diaspora become both recipients and ‘creators’ of Cypriot language and culture. This not only enables an outward gaze but also reveals the inherent otherness, Queerness, and campness that animate the Cypriot identity. Discussing texts, TV shows and exploring language, the presentation invites participants to move, play, and engage with drag as a tool for negotiating and expressing difference as it manifests in queer communities both in London and Cyprus. APHRODITIOS is a drag performer and multidisciplinary artist based between London and Cyprus, showcasing the queerity of Cypriot culture, folklore and music – educating folks on Cypriot identity and existence, both in the homeland and within the diaspora.
December 3, 5:30pm, location by registration
(Un)spelling with Miriam Gatt
Unspelling is a ceremony inviting us to ponder on words as something tactile that can be created and de-created. Rather than treating language as a cannon that fires the outside world into us, we will practice bringing what lives within us outward. Inspired by Simone Weil’s notion of de-creation—the dissolving of the self to make space for the spiritual—we will play with the form of prayer not as a request but as an act of intentional emptying ourselves from language. Miriam will share some of her writings and exercises for unspelling. Come as you are with all the words you carry, come with your curiosity and your hesitation; for to hesitate is already a form of prayer. Miriam is passionate about making things mean and finding meaning with others. Her practice often uses processes of appropriation to take agency over languages employed by institutions such as the family and the church. She self-publishes a series of prayer books and holds experimental ceremonies.
10 Δεκεμβρίου 6:00 μ.μ.
Φυτώριο, Νεχρού 2, Δημοτικός Κήπος Λευκωσίας
Κουβέντα για τα κυπριακά
Με τες Fisherwomxn
Καλούμεν σας να μαζευτούμε γύρω που έναν τραπέζι, να μοιραστούμε τες δυσκολίες που βρίσκουμε άμαν γράφουμε στα κυπριακά τζαι να σκεφτούμαι τρόπους με τους οποίους μπορούμε να κάμουμε την γραφή τους πκιο προσιτή για ούλλα μας. Ταυτόχρονα θέλουμε να συλλογιστούμε πως μπορουμε να κρατήσουμε τούτην την γλώσσα ρευστή χωρίς να την καλουπώνουμε τζαι να διαγράφουμε τες διάφορες εκφάνσεις της. Το Long Table εν μια μέθοδος που χρησιμοποιεί τη διαδικασία ενός διαδραστικού τραπεζιού για να ενθαρρύνει την δημόσια συζήτηση. Το Long Table δημιουργήθηκε το 2003 που την Lois Weaver σαν απάντηση στις ιεραρχίες των παραδοσιακών συζητήσεων με πάνελ.
23 December, Δεκεμβρίου 5:30 pm, at Thkio Ppalies
Γητειές with Eleni Odysseos
For this last gathering we will be joined by Eleni Odysseos who will share her research on Γητειές and we will also present our study folder and what we gathered throughout our co-learning assembly. Eleni draws inspiration from marginalised and persecuted women’s collectives across time and place, who conjure spells that tend to the community, the land, and the waters, making and protecting spaces for solace and regeneration. Reflecting on remnants of such ritualistic practices from the archaic period in Cyprus, Cypriot healing incantations and the journey of the silkworm, her presentation will weave spiritual, ethnographic, and socio-political threads through the personal. Eleni Odysseos is a painter based in Nicosia. By exploring the political and historical resonance of materials and forms, her practice weaves narratives of socio-ecological interdependence and interconnectedness, echoing a collective need for metamorphosis.