The catalogue of the exhibition for the Cyprus Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
It is unclear where ghost stories begin and where they end. On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… retraces them as ghost histories that move beyond incantations of superstitious provenance, to recognise ghosts as agitators of social memory insisting on unresolved grievances. The project's title is taken from the opening sentence of a 2019 Forbes article on a covert spyware operation run out of a black van in the coastal city of Larnaca, alluding to the histories of transmission and interference that render the island of Cyprus a "quiet thoroughfare" for clandestine operations and intelligence interception.
In the context of the participation of Cyprus at the 60th Venice Biennale, Lower Levant Company (LLC), Endrosia Collective and Haig Aivazian come together as Forever Informed. This alias intends to capture the double-edged pursuit for information power saturated by hubristic impossibility, and materialises partly as a fabricated agency residing in the Cyprus Pavilion. Amongst their multiple outlets, this publication stands as a critical apparatus bringing together a collection of writings authored by the artists. Each text appears in English, Cypriot Greek, Cypriot Turkish and Arabic—a substantive rather than representational gesture pointing to current exigencies in the region, while also challenging the boundaries between official institutional languages and nonstandard vernaculars, which throughout modernity have been ideologically deemed culturally inferior.
