In an increasingly connected world, we deal with the overload of issues brought to us through global media by filtering what we see and choose to understand.

 

Scratch the Surface explores the juxtaposition between everyday life and exceptional events. Sometimes the two become blurred because people adapt to living in exceptional (changed) circumstances and the abnormal becomes normal.  This is particularly the case for communities struggling with the legacy of communal violence.  Usually when outsiders and tourists visit post conflict areas they are oblivious of the trauma just beneath the surface.

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One of Europe’s last dividing lines is across the island of Cyprus where a UN buffer zone separates the Greek Cypriots in the South from Turkish Cypriots in the North.  Over the past 40 years most Cypriots have rebuilt their lives but scratch the surface and a deep haemorrhage is evident.  A labyrinth of irreversible consequences has arisen from the prolonged division leading to a stalemate in the re-unification talks.

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Missing  Single washed-up shoes on the beach in Cyprus are a metaphor for all the Cypriot people who disappeared without trace during the 1974 conflict which divided the island into two.

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