The Lower Levant Company (LLC) is a project by Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian that investigates Cyprus’ geopolitical and economic activities, through its affiliations across the Levant and beyond.
The Levant Company, after which the project is named, served as a model for first wave capitalism in the region. By establishing trading alliances between the British, Venetians and the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century and setting up factories in the Eastern Mediterranean, the company was instrumental in the colonisation of the New World. Despite its eventual demise, the company’s structure prefigures the contemporary organisation of financial capital in the region, but also the very historical developments of Cyprus towards its independence. In that sense, LLC considers ways to recontextualise the geopolitical forces that still permeate the island across scales and agencies, while challenging the westernising narratives that exclude Cyprus from its cultural and geographic vicinity.
The inclusion of “Lower” in the name recalibrates the company’s originary ambitions to the project’s own commitment to a practice of material and political regrounding; one that reorients its scope in relation to the land, subterranean activities, and modes of extractivism that operate in the present moment.
Haig Aivazian (b. 1980, Beirut) is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects and moves people, objects, animals, landscape and architecture. Aivazian explores apparatuses of control and sovereignty in sports, museums, the office, music and anywhere else they may be at work.
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Endrosia was established in 2018 as an artist-run project space by Alexandros Xenophontos. Since 2021, Endrosia has been operating as a collective of seven practitioners (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, Alexandros Xenophontos) bringing together a wide spectrum of disciplines through cross-functional processes across exhibitions, spatial activations, printed matter and performance.
The collective is named after a Cypriot phrase that expresses a sense of relief prompted by a cool breeze, a ‘drosia’ that haphazardly seeps through the humidity that is characteristic of our climate. A breeze makes itself felt, be it arbitrarily, even in the most asphyxiating temperatures; a reminder that humidity is not always impenetrable.
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