Filenews 12 January 2025 - by Marios Demetrios
"Over the past twenty years, street art and other creative initiatives in Nicosia, Beirut and Jerusalem have interacted with Green Lines in these cities in different ways, repainting them with the truths of creators, citizens, the urban fabric and the persistent connections that still unite the diverse populations of cities," said Dr. Panos Leventis. Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture of Frederick University, in a lecture at Frederick University in Nicosia.
"Repainting the Green Lines: Urban Identity and Street Art in Beirut, Jerusalem and Nicosia" was the title of the lecture co-organized on November 20, 2024 by the Department of Architecture of Frederick University headed by the Head of the Department Professor Byron Ioannou and the Cyprus Association of Architects headed by the President of the Association Alkis Dikaios. "You will hear an interpretation based on my walking experiences and explorations, interviews and studies of primary and secondary sources," said Dr. Leventis, who is Professor of Architecture at Drury University's Hammons School of Architecture in Springfield, Missouri.
Alternative voices in places of division and suffering
As Dr. Leventis pointed out, "Beirut, Jerusalem and Nicosia have often been and continue to be experienced as fragmented landscapes of conflict." He added: "The Green Lines in these three cities did not remain mere boundaries on proposed maps of post-colonial 'solutions', but were and are being experienced as places of division and suffering.
There remain physical traumas in urban fabrics and psychological scars for citizens who, in addition to the term "Green Line", use terms such as "Contact Points" in Beirut, "Seam" in Jerusalem and "Buffer Zone" in Nicosia. We know very well – and live – the many dotted lines on the maps of the Eastern Mediterranean. Since the creation of Lebanon (1943), Israel (1948) and Cyprus (1960) at the end (;) of colonialism, through constitutional, political and military crises, opposing sides have coexisted with difficulty in the urban fabric of the three cities, often engaging in hostilities. In recent decades, alternative voices, through creative initiatives, have woven unifying urban actions and histories. I will interpret these initiatives as important attempts to combine identities, which intervene in the processes of creating historical narratives, but also in the memory itself of conflicts and attempts, by various forces, to erase this memory. I will discuss examples of street art created near or within the "Green Lines", zones of the three cities that separate conflicting groups, further fragmenting urban fabrics. We will see how the architectural framework plays a complementary but important role in communicating the messages that these examples convey to citizens. It is clear that in all three cases, policies of erasing the reality of the Green Lines are being imposed through creative actions. These policies, which I call not murals, but "colonialisms," grow in urban fabrics, often through top-down initiatives by state or international institutions. The "colonials" repaint the Green Lines with a simplistic "as before, when everyone lived happily" narrative, unabashedly masking the gray reality of unresolved conflicts. On the other hand, actions of local creators use graffiti and street art near the Green Lines, not as acts of oblivion or appeasement, but of resistance and remembrance, both of the periods before and through the conflicts. Contrary to erasure initiatives, these voices repaint Green Lines with testimonies and experiences from diverse creators and urban populations."
Nicosia – reminders of the unresolved conflict
According to Dr. P. Leventis, "after the opening of the barricades in 2003, subsidized murals in Nicosia initiated a process of erasure, through a self-proclaimed 'urban regeneration', covering the ongoing political-military stalemate. Actions covering the realities of war, memoranda and inequality continued with pseudo-reconstructions carried out over the past decade along the Green Line. Freshly painted doors and facades hide dilapidated buildings and city blocks behind them.
State and international institutions are trying to hide Nicosia's Green Line. They mythologize the boundaries and facades of its ruins, creating a theatrical setting where a virtual Nicosia survives happily and free from conflict. In the city, large murals that have dared to deal with the unresolved conflict remain non-existent. In the Walled City, along the Green Line, a series of barricades block access to the area of Ermou Street, which is mostly overlaid by the Green Line. But as façade restorations underway, street art over some of these barricades pointed out their presence and disruptive function.
Works by artists such as Cacao Rocks, Astraki Strikes and Twenty Three served as reminders of the unresolved conflict. Characteristic are the intense touches of Cacao Rocks in 2013 on the barricade of Eptanisou Street and on an adjacent wall on Lidinis Street that, consciously or not, drew attention to the dead ends of Nicosia. In a similar way, the murals of Astraki Strikes south of the Line in the fortunately "forgotten" area between the Podocattaro Bastion and the Old Market, made from 2014 until the pandemic, under the title "Mapping The Old City", gave identity and were experienced by the residents, as a form of resistance to the neoliberalization of their neighbourhood. Also executed in 2013 for a street party of the Avant Garde edition, a mural by Twenty Three, depicting an elderly mustachioed reading newspaper on a wall right on the barricade of Talos Street, gave life to the area, adding a face-stamp of a Cypriot identity, humanizing a hostile space, without hiding its true nature – that of a dam. While the "colonials" attempt to hide the Green Line of Nicosia, works by artists such as Cacao Rocks, Astraki Strikes and Twenty Three, near or tangential to the Line, refer clearly to existing issues of local identity and conflict, working on urban fissures and emphasizing the presence, form, materiality, fabric and geometries of the Line.
The Rhino and the Buffalo of Beirut
In his report on the Beirut case, Dr. Leventis recalled, among other things, that in 1994, the central part of the city's Green Line was given to Solidère, a company established by government decree to reconstruct the city center. "Murals and other public art initiatives in Beirut, Solidère, are few and far from the reformed area," he said, adding: "The exception is 'Rhino and Buffalo', a prime example of 'colonialism' that supports Solidère's goals.
It was created in 2017 by Cuban-American artist Ernesto Maranger, in collaboration with UNHCR Lebanon and the international NGO AptArt. "Rhinoceros and Buffalo" is located on the south wall of an interwar apartment building, a rare remnant on Lance Street southwest of the center of the Green Line. The project was part of the "Paint Outside the Lines" initiative, with international artists and city children completing murals in various parts of Beirut. On the narrative of the symbiotic relationship between the two animals, Maranhe said that "Rhinoceros and Buffalo" "serves as a reminder that diversity can be beneficial, not a burden." The action may have momentarily pleased the children, who had clear instructions to draw only "symbiotic relationships in nature". However, the theme of the colourful mural, combined with its location on the edge of Solidère's "Beirut Souks", not only did not escape policies of erasing history, but became part of those policies. An "aesthetic" was used here to stun the city, denying it the right to converse with its own past and present. This "colonialism" is public art that goes against the right of the population to their city. The traumatic stories of the city remain untold and the painted wall seems like a romantic, exotic image cut off from its surroundings."
Eyes staring at Jerusalem
"Along the eastern edge of Rafi, lies Silwan, a Palestinian village hanging from the hills southeast of the Old City," Dr. Leventis said. "For years," he continued, "its inhabitants have been threatened and expelled from the village in an attempt to change the ethnic composition of the area. In the neighbourhood of Batn al-Hawa, an action called "I Witness Silwan" has been taking place since 2019. The action is a collaboration between American artist and director of the "Art Forces" group Susan Green, the local Madaa Arts Center and the villagers. The action uses murals depicting human eyes as testimony and protest. Fragments of faces, aphorisms in the form of eyes belonging to ordinary citizens and well-known activists and recognizable figures of the cultural sphere, look insistently, back towards the Walled City and beyond the "Seam", towards West Jerusalem. Greene observes that with this "radical and dangerous" project, she wants "Siloan to look in every direction," reversing the surveillance gaze into an "act of visual decolonization."
Jawad Siyam from Madaa Arts Centre adds: "The eyes tell people we see them and they should see us too. We want to say we're here, we love our home, we love our land." The work is a rare example of street art in Jerusalem, projecting non-dominant views, making inconvenient truths visible on the urban fabric. It does not depict symbols of peace, nor does it insist on a simple "existence" or survival. These kinds of works, the future fate of which is uncertain, actively oppose mural and cultural colonization."
*Dr Panos Leventis noted that his lecture is part of research carried out within the framework of the interdisciplinary project "Questionable Urbanity", whose field studies were funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education. The research team was staffed by the School of Architecture, Fine Arts and Communications of Drury University and the School of Geography, Tourism and Public Administration of the University of Central Sweden. He added that the text of his research has been published in the book Architectures of Resistance, published in 2024 by Leuven University Press and has been translated into Greek for this lecture.
