"Strawberry Fields..." 2012, Nicos Synnos CY

​​one of five works on title Strawberry Fields...:Global economic crisis, simulacra, maps, and simulated borderlines for exhibition THROUGH

THE ROADBLOCKS ,Realities in Raw Motion ,November 2012 at Evargos Lanitis Centre, Limassol, CY. Antonis Danos, Yiannis Christidis, Yiannos Economou, Nicos Synnos and Yannis Yapanis collaborate in the project

Strawberry fields …: Global economic crisis, simulacra, maps, and simulated borderlines

Another morning on the way to the office. I finally manage to park, alongside the fenced courtyard of a church. A young man – “looks like” a gypsy from the “north” – is selling small baskets of strawberries, cheaply. “Do you want some?” – I decline (too many things on my mind). We are walking in the same direction. “Where are they from?”, I ask. – “From [the village of] Derhynia”, he replies. Obviously, they have come from up “north” (hence the low price)! Derhynia is just the crossing point. – “I’ll take a basket”…

Evening news – one station after another… An annoyingly boring repetition of images of (euro) coins dropping off the mint’s machinery, and (euro) banknotes being (automatically) counted… It’s the financial crisis daily “update” – money is “short”, yet it overflows off the psychotically and fetishistically looped,  close-up images of currency…

“Strawberry fields for ever – Nothing is real / Nothing to get hung about…”

A global (i.e. Western) financial crisis. Accumulation of virtual wealth – the bubble has burst! Accumulation of virtual goods/art/culture. – Damien Hirst’s diamond scull (“For the love of God”, indeed!), sold at 50 million pounds, sold to [a “consortium” that included] himself. Now, he’s at the Tate – a retrospective! Is he at the MoMA, yet?

The nouveau riche “mediterraneanism” of Cypriot, mass produced villas and “luxury apartments” – to be sold to British and Russians, and to ourselves…

Hirst’s “scull”, his dot paintings / the Cypriot “med” villas: mere mass products in the industrial production mode, or contemporary code products – Baudrillard’s simulacra? The strawberries from the “north”, from the “pseudo-state’s” strawberry fields, are they real? Did I ever buy them? Was the young man “real”?

Both he and the strawberries crossed over via the “buffer zone” (the “dead zone” or, more cheerfully, the “green line”).

Buffer zone sounds: people, cars, footsteps, voices, church bells, the imam from the minaret. This is no roadblock, no dividing line. It is a transitory space – a non-space? a hybrid space? – a becoming space? Perhaps, the only ‘real’ space because of its becoming, its constant flux, its fluidity. Is a ‘fixed’ space, by default, a simulation? Are all -scapes simulacra? What of maps?

Mapping as a code-generated reproduction. The absence of an “origin”. A map – a hyper-reality? Are roadblocks, borders, and divisions of all kinds, ‘mere’ simulacra? No “origins”, just “codes”… Antonis Danos