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Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid, 2004

Diatopos Art Centre is pleased to present Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid, by Klitsa Antoniou curated by Daphne Nikita. Antoniou invites the viewer into a total environment, rather than simply asking us to contemplate discrete works of art from a distance. Traditional boundaries between artwork and audience dissolve as we enter a space saturated with material, image, and memory. What we encounter is not a collection of isolated objects, but fragments of a larger, imagined world—a poetic and immersive landscape born of dreams, desires, frustrations, and collective memory.

“Wandering” may seem an apt word to describe our movement through this installation, but it suggests a detached experience, one that Antoniou deliberately subverts. Here, we are not passive observers. We are participants, submerged within a surreal and emotionally charged realm—a reflection of our existence on this island, surrounded by sea, suspended between histories we cannot undo and futures we cannot predict.

The imaginary world Antoniou constructs is at once a sanctuary and a site of yearning—a space of escape and of transformation. But the impossibility of this utopia is signalled from the outset. Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—was the term used by the ancient Romans to assert imperial dominance over the Mediterranean. In contrast, Cyprus’s history, and its destiny, have long been shaped by external forces. The “visions of a mermaid” express a longing for freedom and reinvention in a land where the term “ours” has always been contested.

In Dystopian Stories, docked boats appear poised for departure. Their surfaces bear the imprints of domestic life—traces of tools, hands, and rituals. Nearby, in What’s the Use of Waiting?, plastic and latex rolls are stacked like symbolic luggage—containers of memory, hopes, and the remnants of a life left behind. Yet these boats never leave; they sit grounded, inverted, stranded. The sea becomes land, and the promise of departure turns inward, perhaps pointing toward alternative, mythic modes of escape.

Hybrid Zone offers a surreal, almost mythological solution: two oversized pairs of legs—one human with elongated fins, the other avian—suggesting a metamorphosis into other life forms, capable of traversing sea or sky. The transformation is both literal and symbolic: the finned legs carry the imprints of past lives, signalling that the sea is not merely an escape route, but a destination. The boats are overturned, indicating a reversal. The sea becomes the new homeland.

In the monumental photograph Mare Nostrum, the sea is upheld by a wooden pier, whose supports and nearby walls (Tracing Homeness) are covered in familiar imprints—echoes of touch, time, and home. Rather than voyage toward another land, Antoniou invites us to inhabit the sea itself, to claim it as our new dwelling. Leading this metamorphic journey is a mythical figure—the mermaid.

In Decided Views, or Else Visions, located on the lower level of the exhibition, seaweed blankets the floor and ceiling. At the centre, a mermaid clings to a pole, her head and neck vanishing into the ceiling above. Tangled wires descend like hair, wrapping around her body and connecting to a television screen on the floor. On the screen, we see what she sees—calm waters, a distant shoreline. Her gaze moves rhythmically in and out of the water. The scene is silent. This disjunction between sight and sound disorients us, intensifying the sense of being submerged in an unfamiliar, silent realm.

The mermaid serves as both guide and alter ego for the artist. Antoniou doesn’t simply create this new space—she inhabits it. In Birth Certificate, a large, inverted photograph of the artist as a young girl is overlaid with seaweed, carefully arranged to appear as though it has grown over time. The image evokes a long-forgotten seaside memory, yet the seaweed suggests a process of rebirth—a natural and unnatural emergence from the womb.

This sacred, dreamlike atmosphere is pierced by an unexpected object: a pair of bright-red high-heeled shoes that fuse into a mermaid’s tail (Step by Step). At once absurd and poignant, this object draws from Dadaist satire and Surrealist dissonance. It gestures toward a fractured world—a schizophrenic mingling of fantasy and reality, past and future, desire and absurdity. The shoes are worn by Antoniou’s mermaid-self in The Dangerous Liaison, a photographic appropriation of Magritte’s 1926 painting, where she holds another image—the mermaid torso from the installation—layering presence and absence, identity and transformation.

On the top floor, a tall, minimalist tower constructed from seaweed, Summer House, rises like a monument to lost innocence. It recalls the island’s dual identity as both a summer paradise and a site of deep historical trauma. The tower’s closed form invokes claustrophobia and unease. Inside, a projection casts the image of a clear summer sky onto the ceiling—an opening, perhaps, or a view from within a trench or a ruined building. Birds and airplanes flash across the frame in momentary, ghostlike intervals, their speed and anonymity disturbing the calm. The planes are drawn from footage of the 1974 Turkish bombings of Cyprus; the birds suggest a more fragile, elusive hope for peace.

Antoniou appears again as Magritte’s The Collective Invention—a mermaid lying on the shore, adorned with the red, fish-tailed shoes. But unlike Magritte’s reversed chimera, Antoniou’s upper body is veiled in seaweed, referencing both her origin in the Birth Certificate image and her gradual transformation into a creature of the sea. The mermaid’s journey becomes cyclical: emerging, guiding, and finally retreating back into the womb of the seaweed—back into the mythical homeland of mare nostrum.

Through this transformation, Antoniou leads us into a liminal world—at once utopian and dystopian. A world shaped by contradiction, where the past and future collide, and where escape demands not flight, but metamorphosis. In Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid, we do not merely observe; we are asked to undergo. To step outside the bounds of the known. To imagine other forms of life, of memory, of belonging.

And in the end, the mermaid disappears—not into myth, but into “our sea.”