Performance of Being State: Exceptional and Fictitious Performances in prescriptive village; Pyla

In the hybrid Turkish and Greek Cypriot village of Pyla, different languages, segregated public places such as schools and markets, as well as the United Nations (UN) inspection towers determine everyday life. This thesis deals with the implications of the UN’s vision for Pyla as a prototype of integrity and bi-communality. Performance of Being State analyses and problematises the UN mandate system in order to challenge its ‘peace-keeping’ and ‘peace-making’ strategies.

Through applying Michel Foucault’s notion of power the aim is to explore the indirect ways in which power is exercised in social life, by paying attention to the mundane practices and ideas that structure inhabitants’ everyday life. The word performance in the thesis title refers to the prescriptive regulations and rules whose aim is to establish a unified Pyla, and to also show how this overlaps and is resisted by Turkish and Greek Cypriots’ divergent subjectivities; being state calls attention to how this codification is a performance that attempts to create a normalised or ideal state.

Such power relations and normalisation strategies were questioned by means of performative design interventions in Pyla through the concept of Performance of Being State. These spatial performances can be understood as acts that challenge the UN mandate system. Furthermore, this thesis aims to critically reflect on such actions to examine dialectical power relations and their embodiment in space. My objective is to look beyond a radical ideology of conflict resolution, and to instead propose a spatial methodology for working with and across conflict by engaging performative narratives