the Great Wall of Lempa and Carnivalesque

The Great Wall of Lempa and the Carnivalesque examines one of Cyprus's most complex and neglected artistic environments: the Great Wall of Lempa, the large-scale sculptural installation created over several decades around the former site of the Cyprus College of Art under the direction of the artist Stass Paraskos.Taking Michael Paraskos's interpretation of the Wall as a form of performance art as its starting point, Helene Gerstfeld argues that the work can be understood more fully through Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of the carnivalesque, polyphony, heteroglossia and unfinalisability. Rather than treating the Wall as a single, self-contained sculpture, she presents it as an open, collaborative and continually evolving field of competing voices, materials, histories and meanings. In doing so, the book explores how the Wall's humour, grotesque imagery, collective authorship and resistance to completion make it a distinctive and significant work of modern art in the eastern Mediterranean.