We Never Had Winners

We Never Had Winners, 2021

Nicolas Lambouris

We Never Had Winners acts as a starting point of reference to a completed three-part volume project titled ‘Propaedeutics on Memorial Structures Vol. 1, 2 & 3’ investigating the social, political and cultural condition of memorials monuments in Cyprus. This last chapter considers these constructed ‘material sites of memory’ operating as physical and semantic objects within the Greek-Cypriot sociopolitical fabric and examines their ascriptions onto asserted national and historical narratives. Questioning the complexed historical and cultural assimilation of the Greek National narrative in Cyprus –an ideology that acted both as the foundation for declaring the island an independent state in 1960 and as the basis for the formation of a Greco-Cypriot identity-, the work poses a paradoxical statement on the ‘failed’ victorious symbols of the nation. Elevating their dead war heroes onto celebrated pedestals as glorious symbols of national sacrifice and sanctity, was as an attempt for Cypriots to claim their righteousness into political freedom from their historical past, but most importantly to claim and re-affirm their Greekness. One that stipulated cultural, national and religious identification with motherland Greece and therefore permitted some form of participation in a glorious historical narrative. Employing the photographic medium as an interpretive act of the material object, space and time, the project dissects the associations between material and structure, between structure and its pictorial representation, between representation and its simulated-signified historical narrative.

The work adapts an artistic research approach -both in its production and presentation- through which photographs, photographic archives, found images, objects and material traces form visual constellations of selected sequences and fragmented narratives allowing for multiple readings and associations. Images of classical Greek sculpture, fragments of marble, fabricated artifacts, visual displays of both Greek and Cypriot archaeological museums are combined (and juxtaposed) with visual inventories or signs of memorial monument surfaces. Photographs and images that act as visual cues point to a research display of a museum collection, a display that brings into question both the institutional function of a museum as a cultural act and its effect on historical and cultural narratives. The constructed archive -the subjective and re-structuring as artistic practice- brings into question the representation of representations; the material object and its photographic image as means of referral and reciprocal equivalences in displaying cultural residues.