Brrr!

In the great manner of talking about architecture through its representations, the above representation of a mirroring, as found on youtube, carries on talking about architecture's representations. Following the Improv Everywhere's initial Grand Central partial and hoaxical halting of traffic and the subsequent extended celebrations of slowness, Freeze at Ledras brought together a few tenths of people who had "synchronise[d] their watches in a co-ordination meeting beforehand" and "at exactly the same time ... [did] freeze for 5 minutes". The Freeze at Ledras' aimed residue, as stated on the dedicated facebook event wall, was to initiate a "silent commentary" on the perceived "frozen" state of the 70 or so meters of Ledra street recently opened to civilian traffic. Yet as stated in the video documentation, it claims to be an a-political act (gesture, tactic, event - choose your terminology), while at the same time being "a celebration of the newfound mobility in this particular space and a hope for a greater mobility in the future."

The reference to "silent commentary" can only be seen as an endearing to its authors word-play. Since nothing can be more naive to uncritically locate the body outside the deafening, over-determining hubbub of urban configurations, such as the street, and claim it to be 'silent'. The extremely well defined postures of the freeze participants are anything but silent, in absentia murmurs; they are loud and clear utterances, cries, screams, short-circuiting the conventional structures of communication exchange and of economistic, self-centered circulation. Utopic, momentary and problematic in their relation at least to perceptions of time, but anything but silent. The uncritical engagement of the Ledras' freeze with itself however does not stop at the mere wording of its aims. In both text and video the inability to critically survey the frameworks of event this 70m of geography is evident. No one can argue with the re-newed understanding of the concept and practise of mobilty within and through Ledras street. Nor can hopes for differencing the perception and re-presentation of Nicosia, Ledras or the 'Cyprus Problem' be overlooked. But only a disengaged observer, one locked within dogmatic socio-centric readings of the city can describe the so-called 'dead zone's' state pre-3 April 2008 as frozen. Contraband, civilian and military verbal and scopic exchange, fly-tipping, tourist excursions, UN drive-by administration, the aura of materials and buildings, non-anthropomorphic life, grid and sewage sevices - all these are eliminated from Freeze in Ledras' understanding of Ledras - which in turn is the act's reason d' etre - for the sake probably of a belonging to a movement, albeit of 'freeze-frame'.

What really though sends shivers down one's spine is the stated negation of politics within the contexts of commenting urban space is also telling of the perceived representations and receptions of the city of Nicosia. Nicosia: the non-polis. The greek term for it - Chora - echoes of receptacles after all, welcoming receptacles of foundational conceptions, of mythical pre-linguistic positions, where manifestations are nurtured but which as a space is resistant to its reduction to any such manifestations' appropriations. The tradition of immigrant songs across the globe - from Irish ballads about London to 1930's post-rembetika structures of Athenian civic engagement and pride and from Kazantzides to the No Wave New York sound - stand as proof to this awareness re the traces of the city as both, and at once nurturing and alienating. The spatial term chora also denotes the area surrounding a polis: the bucolic countryside, the sub-urban. What is not civic, not part of the city. When it comes to especially Nicosia's walled city, this is the chora that seems to underscore its readings and shape its representations. Its imagined biography, as time goes by, is one of romanticised nature-prone facades, stone(d) remains, Berlinesque futures -where cultural capital will pave the way for economic regeneration - and sexual deviance of ever-changing origins, reflecting a mirroring of desires and apprehensions, external positions, rather than a participatory if fleeting grasping of the plethora of Nicosia's particulars.

Freeze at Ledras even though it might have wanted to bring at a productive crisis Nicosia's understanding of Nicosia, has stayed stale and stalled in its mirroring of the dominant symbolic a -political discourses surrounding the city of Nicosia. Devoid of the humorous context of other freeze acts, which together with the reconfiguration of the modalities (or agencies) of individuation appears to be Improv Evrywhere's motive and objective, Freeze at Ledras thus remained another mundane reproduction of an essentially cultural act, akin to a vast proportion of the Cypriot cultural production, unable to critically contextualise and comprehend its methods and output in relation not only to its immediate environments but also towards its international outlook and responsibilities. As such it might have been more productive for the desired debate on the pasts and futures of Nicosia via Ledras street, if its muted attempts to 'silently' comment on political matters were to remain for ever silent.