I am not me on my own
(2022-2025)

I am not me on my own (2022-2025) is a body of personal research that emerged through my involvement as a researcher in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 RISE transdisciplinary research action: Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange (SPACEX-rise), 2022–26. I was seconded (from NCAD) to Home for Cooperation in Nicosia, Cyprus where I conducted research as part of the ‘Urban Subjects’ work package which considers how pedagogic strategies in spatial practice contribute to the transformation and construction of subjectivity, asking ‘What forms of knowledge are produced, and what types of subjects are supported?’

Between 2023 and 2025, I made four visits to Nicosia in Cyprus, with the intention of exploring how different aspects of a city’s infrastructure can project and enforce specific subjectivities. I was also paying attention to social practices that I encountered, that were nurturing emergent or collective subjectivities – something I’m committed to in my own collaborative arts practice. Being an outsider, with few connections initially, and a limited amount of time, my instinctive methodology was to walk the city. As Rebecca Solnit says ‘[t]he most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak’ (Wanderlust, A History of Walking, 2022, p3). I walked alone, sometimes to get from one place to another, sometimes to consciously observe and listen. Sometimes I walked with others. I also took thousands of photos and made sketches. I stopped to meet many people – some arranged, some spontaneous, and to reflect and write as a live trace of my encounters. With four trips over two years, I developed a practice of re-walking the same place over and over, and reconnecting with some people over multiple trips. A practice of deep listening underpinned it all.

The emerging work I am not me on my own recognises the intersubjective nature of listening and my role as a pollinator, as I critically engaged and reflected and brought my experience of each encounter to be part of the next one. Throughout the process, it became very important to also reflect on my own positionality, and subjectivities that were elicited in me, and that I felt in specific moments. Importantly, the approach I have taken in collating text and image, is personal, consciously partial and affective. In writing and visualising my reflections in this way, it is my hope that multiple themes come into view in all their complexity, intersecting through the passages of text and image. Such themes that should not be reduced to summarising statements. They exist in the inhabited, relational and textured experience of this project.

Aware of the tension in doing this work as an outsider, it was important for me to first present this work in November 2025 at the Nicosia Townhall event, organised as part of the Spacex-rise project. Given some of the subjectivities elicited in me in this process, it was also interesting to present it later that month in England, at the ‘Living Better Together’ Spacex-rise conference.

I hope in time, that a longer publication of this work will be of value to any student, researcher or artist in thinking about how we frame others’ subjectivities in the invitations we create - an important consideration in the field of collaborative and socially engaged art practice. Furthermore, I hope that it has value in reflecting on the multiplicity of ourselves that we each carry into any research or engagement process, and its effect on what is seen, heard and generated. Finally, it's important to consider how creative collaborative practice can support the imagining and modelling of new subjectivities.

For further information on the Spacex Rise project, see: spacex-rise.org