War Loot
2000
Installation
Mixed media
Variable dimensions
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Inv. No. 1678/25
The sculptural installation of Cypriot artist Maria Loizidou, bearing the eloquent and explicitly indicative title Trauma / War Loot (2000), attempts to process and memorialise a personal and, at the same time, collective traumatic war experience. To forge this work, the artist collected used clothes and fabric scraps from people close to her, such as her mother or her friends, and made dolls with them. Loizidou invested herself in a meticulous and copious handcrafting process of recycling and reusing the material, cutting the fabrics, intervening, and sewing them anew. Despite their malleable and soft nature, the garments have become objects of detailed, intense treatment and have defined a new skin, sheath, and covering for her peculiar dolls. The work’s conceptual background remains inseparable from the historical and socio-political context of its creation; it was realised in 2000, 26 years after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. This was a period of renegotiating the trauma of war and activating within the public sphere discourses excluded until then, a case that led three years later to the decision by the Turkish-Cypriot leadership to lift the ban on the crossing of the Green Line by Greek Cypriots. In Trauma / War Loot, the pile from the conqueror’s loot and plunder serves as a means for the activation of contemplation around the traumatic past and opens up possibilities of recognition, healing, and, eventually, redemption.