Radio Nikosia

 

Nikosia is a device, a collective and an association comprising people with and without medically-managed psychic suffering. It positions itself as a social space in which the fight avoids the shutting down of identity that leads to diagnostic labels, instead paving the way for the plurality necessary in all attempts to address complex matters.

In day-to-day life, and particularly in the political realm, Nikosia is an assembly, a series of spaces and instances of shared care and support, workshops in cultural centres, and radio, literary, audiovisual and academic programmes and interventions. Generally, no more and no less than situations for meeting and building together, conceived based on intersubjectivity, at the meeting points between what is private and what is shared, with honest attention to the subjectivity of the other. The symbolic production of each individual is just as important as the collective production of meanings and interactions. The various devices that comprise the experience are coherent with the questions asked by Jean Oury and returned to recently by Peter Pal Pelbart:

How can we support a collective that preserves the dimension of singularity? How can we create diverse spaces with their own flavour, different atmospheres, in which each person joins in their own way? How can we maintain availability that encourages meetings without imposing them; support that enables contact and preserves otherness? How can we facilitate randomness without scheduling it? How can we support a ‘kindness’ that enables the emergence of a conversation out there in the growing affective desert?

Peter Pal Pelbart

This and that could comprise Nikosia. Open plaza, public plaza, intimate plaza; one which is busy, a porous refuge, permeable, with a constant and joyful tendency towards exogamy. Perhaps everyone comes here to return to being the person who does not need to be here. Perhaps Nikosia is that shared, exuberant, tangled, alive garden marking the convergence of paths which later, unfailingly, will fork once more.