Paper short abstract:

Investing in collaborative and process based approaches, we will address Buffer Fringe Festival’s enactment of a new understanding of space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond the liminal fragility of a post-conflict buffer zone and the pandemic in 2020/ 2021.

Paper long abstract:

The Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival has born out of a rather contested and fragile space in between borders, the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. In this paper, we will address the Festival’s enactment of a new understanding of space that can enable resistance and co-creation beyond the liminality of a post-conflict buffer zone and the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Since it’s establishment in 2014, the festival laid the ground to establish a creative, critical and performative space with consistent presence all across the Island. However, 2020 brought along the pandemic and the closure of crossing points in Cyprus which created a split in all planned activity and demonstrated the fragility of contact between communities and artists. Notwithstanding, this split was also a moment of questioning and perseverance which produced other possibilities. Buffer Fringe 2020 was one of the few artistic platforms in Cyprus and globally to have adapted and materialised a festival amid the Covid-19 pandemic also developing interdisciplinary and innovative methodologies which enable exploring the relationship between arts, resistance, solidarity and peacebuilding, investing in collaborative and process based approaches. Encouraging a decolonizing agenda and embedding creativity into a social process, we will firstly question the role art and co-creation can play at a moment and a space of transition to produce alternative subjectivities to dominant ideologies. Secondly, we will discuss how the Buffer Fringe 2020 and 2021 responded to the pandemic and the potential that liminal spaces like a buffer zone or a pandemic may produce.