For the Cyprus participation at the 60th Venice Biennale, the team of ten artists (Lower Levant Company, Endrosia Collective, Haig Aivazian) published a multilingual print edition that oscillates between history and fiction in a layered exploration of the sociopolitical and material forms of “ghosting”, and how these manifest geopolitically across the wider region surrounding Cyprus.

The book opens with a short story in epistolary form, authored by Marina Ashioti and Irini Khenkin of Endrosia. Unrequited letters are perhaps the original form of ghosting in the way the term is defined within the cultural zeitgeist: the inexplicable, one-sided act of cutting off contact with someone. The genre alone lends itself to perceptive explorations of ghosting, which here informs the narrative of a woman using the alias Signal Siren writing letters to her deceased lover, when the discovery of a new real estate project within the “British Sovereign Base Areas” in Cyprus prompts a shift in the narrative’s temporal current. The short story also acts as a companion piece to a two-channel video installation titled “Despite our severed connection,”.

Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian, Emiddio Vasquez) retrace the birth of radio to its fascist roots, before putting forth the case of Sharq al-Adna: a shortlived station set up by the British in Mandatory Palestine in 1941 as a main prong of “information work” before migrating to Cyprus in 1948 along with its Palestinian staff. The case report is framed as a series of findings collated by reddit user shaba-7el-adna into a web of “covert operations, postwar paranoia, geopolitical dramas, orientalist fantasies, partially disclosed foreign policies and ghostwritten biographies”, within the pages of this book and through portals to online rabbit holes. With this approach, and by refusing the rigid tenets of historytelling, they effectively ask whether the ghost of Sharq al-Adna still haunts the present – in renewed, still incomprehensible forms – as we bear witness to the ongoing coverage of the genocide in Gaza.

The book’s final chapter takes the form of a sprawling text by Haig Aivazian, who weaves a multitude of threads, ideas and histories into an essay about light and darkness; about infrastructures; about words as metaphors that become machines weaponised by the occupation in its onslaught on Gaza; about numbers as machines to the occupation’s algorithmic surveillance and automated apartheid. Above all, this is an attempt to write Palestine, to dig tunnels and reach the machines that we can build when we write Palestine to one another, be it through powerful words, survival mechanisms, or means of armed resistance.

These texts were written by the artists in English and translated to the local Cypriot dialects (Cypriot Greek by Lina Protopapa, Cypriot Turkish by Aycan Garip) and Arabic by Hussein Nassereddine, supplemented by a foreword written by Louli Michaelidou and Ioulita Toumazi. The print edition was co-published by Archive Books and the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture.