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Kyrenia Mountains: The Painted Landscape

Part 2 Project 2015
Catherine Segah Griffiths
 University for the Creative Arts | UK
On an island of contested territories, the Kyrenia Mountain Range of Cyprus is an imperative site. Visible from both sides of the UN buffer zone and from the capital, Nicosia, the thesis takes advantage of its positioning by proposing a series of architectural headlines upon the mountains and its foothills relating to man’s relationship with nature. The headlines are designed as monuments: machines that paint the landscape.

The interim proposal’s intention is to bring to awareness the changes in values over time. The monument erodes the iconic Besparmak peak over the course of a century, a proposition that only enhances the current situation of landslides in the area caused by uncontrolled illegal quarrying. Its intention is to shock people into a realisation of the extremities that are occurring, comparable to the eighteenth century notion in the history of art of denoting ‘the world as it is’.

The main proposal denotes a dualism between man and nature, more of a romantic equilibrium in sublimity rather than sheer ecocentrism. Organic pigments are produced onsite from sources abundant on the mineral-rich island using methods practiced since antiquity on remote mountain sites, yet combining them with modern technology to paint the mountain sites themselves.

Catherine Segah Griffiths
Tutor(s)
Mr John Bell
2015
Active mines and quarries by region in Cyprus. The Troodos mountain range hosts abandoned mines causing acid drainage; the Kyrenia mountain range endures landslides from quarrying.
The Kyrenia range site’s high visibility attribute has been made use of with a political statement following the war of 1974. The iconic Besparmak peak, east of the flag, is under threat from illegal quarrying, both visible from the island’s capital.
It is the by-product of copper mining on the island, sulphuric acid, that is used as the means to erode mountain.
The acid and pigment dispersal pipes hold the five-finger negative cast, a memory of the former mountain.
Pigments are chosen based on locally occurring source materials and what can be cultivated on site.
The site becomes the quarries themselves; pigments combine with fertiliser rather than acid.
Carmine pigment production tower.
Cochineal insects have been cultivated in mountainous regions since antiquity and hand-picked before extracting their pigment.
Experimentation of each pigment on a limestone substrate. Stability attributes such as lightfastness and acid solubility were tested.
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