The Broken Pitcher

A project by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, Peter Eramian, with Raissa Angeli, Dimitris Chimonas, Stelios Kallinikou, Athina Kassiou, Orestis Lambrou, Orestis Lazouras, Panagiotis Mina (Pyrgatory Studios), Faysal Mroueh, Keti Papadema, Nayia Savva, Nikos Stephou, Maria Toumazou, Rumen Tropchev, Emiddio Vasquez. The iteration at de Appel features new contributions from Stelios Kallinikou, Olga Micińska, and Maria Toumazou.

Tracing the effects of financialisation and austerity, the collaborative project The Broken Pitcher by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou and Peter Eramian attends to a concrete case: a crucial meeting at a bank, negotiating the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaca, Cyprus in 2019. Foreclosures are one of the austerity measures that were imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) after the financial crisis in 2012.

The Broken Pitcher looks at the banking system and the potentials for changing the script of interacting with it. The project consists of a one-to-one scale model of the bank room, that functions both as an exhibition space as well as a set which features in a 70min film that reconstructs the scene. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s film First Case – Second Case (1979, Iran), the reenactment of the bank meeting is then shown to people from various backgrounds who are asked to respond to the question: “In your opinion what should the bank employees do?”. The filmed responses encompass perspectives of people from different interest groups in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists in Barcelona, Berlin and Beirut, people who are similarly affected by these policies, public figures, lawyers, economists and artists.

One of the project’s main interests is collaboration as a practice of collectivity. Starting in 2020, gatherings and workshops were at the core of its making, in order to find structures and formats of working together, scripting and researching the context of foreclosures in relation to debt, austerity, financialisation and coloniality and to counter the isolation and desperation they produce. The meeting at the bank and its space was drafted after memory logs of the affected family and their lawyer. Starting from a workshop at the independent artist-led space Thkio Ppalies in Nicosia, the bank room set and its parts were conceived together with artists who each took on a separate aspect of the set. The items in the room depart from a functional replica and become artworks in their own right, bearing witness to the meeting and offering portals to imagining an otherwise.

The accounts of the affected family were unpacked and reconstructed in workshops with actors who reenacted the dialogue in a filmed improvisation. The selection of respondents to the scene traces personal connections, friendships and expertise shared in and over various communities. Several screenings at public squares in Cyprus and a first presentation at Thkio Ppalies in May 2022, concluded in often extended discussions in local neighborhood communities. Since then, the project has travelled and woven itself through allied self-organised and institutional partners and their communities in Beirut, Leipzig, Munich, New York, Amsterdam, Cairo, Novi Sad and beyond, continuing to situate itself within the contexts it encounters.

Personal testimonies, bonding over shared experiences and ideas for planning and organising in response to the micro- and macro- effects of debt, are shared and help to connect and learn from each other. In the iteration at de Appel, The Broken Pitcher foregrounds historical patterns of rupture through interlocutors who approach practice both as a social score and as a source of radical, infrastructural intimacy. This chapter features artistic contributions by Stelios Kallinikou, Olga Micińska and Maria Toumazou, whose works trace the dead-ends of state bureaucracy and the collapse of banking as a social structure.