Triptych Project: Chosen Tree, Amber Onar letter, Chosen Tree, the Tree of Peace

In 2003, Cyprus was undergoing one of its most crucial political moments. United Nations Secretary General Koffi Anan who proposed a plan for the solution of the Cyprus problem arrived on the island just before his plan was put to a referendum. A number of Greek and Turkish Cypriot artists were invited to commemorate the occasion by creating works inspired by the prospect of the island’s re-unification. An exhibition took place at the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia. Although Turkish Cypriot leader Raouf Denktash forbade the participation of the Turkish Cypriot artists, Koffi Annan asked UN soldiers in Cyprus to transport the Turkish Cypriots’ works to be exhibited. This work by Emin Cisenel, titled ‘The Chosen Tree, a Candle for Peace’, expresses the artist’s hope for a final settlement of the Cyprus dispute. Emin Cisenel used pen, watercolour and collage photocopies to record his idea of a project to be executed on the day of the signing of the re-unification agreement. A helicopter would help cover one of the four cypress trees in the courtyard of Bellapais Abbey with a huge nylon. The artist would then install a bright red light under the tree and light it as a candle for peace. An orchestra would sing the new anthem of the island and that of the European Union. The Anan plan was never accepted or implemented. The project, never realized, still remains on paper, in the form of a diptych, accompanied by a letter written by the artist’s friend Anber Onar. 23 February 2003 Dear Emin, I am writing in response to your ‘Chosen Tree’ project. As surreal as our existence is here, your response to our circumstances seems to find possibilities in the impossible. The photocopy-collage-sketches use a surreal language where the familiar is made unfamiliar through juxtapositions – daylight behind the Gothic arches set against the dark background of the sky; and orange hand-painted tree set against the black and white photocopied ruins of Bellapais – at the same time, the additional hand-drawn sketches of the shroud-fabric be put on the tallest tree; the helicopters assisting, hand-written notes and measurements, all speak the language of the future plants of an engineer. The contrast between the ruin and the future plans or the surreal and the real, the hand-paint and the mechanical reproduction, harmoniously co-exist in these sketches which may very smoothly describe the binary oppositions in our lives. Is this simply a plan to be built or realized in the future, has it already achieved its goal, or does it stand here simply as an other unfinished ruin, as already the past? In such ambivalent circumstances, can we experience reality as a possibility without feeling surreal? Or is the surreal our only way to experience the ‘real’? Can we experience the past without the future or the future without the past? To answer this, we could try to go back to the ‘original’ past of the tree. It has been the symbol for life, or temptation or knowledge or immortality, etc, but the tree always seems to change into something else depending on which angle we look at it from. The tree contains the four elements of life; water – in its sop, earth – in its body, air in its leaves; and fire in its potential; this tree, which symbolizes regeneration of life, is also in the roots of the Phoenix which periodically sets itself on fire and then is reborn out of its own ashes – it erases its own ever-regenerated original and recreates it at the same time; its only salvation is the reconstruction of its own original. (How real can this original be? How many times can the ‘original’ be recreated?) And in this way the future becomes the past and the past the future. ‘Chosen tree’ has been chosen in a ritualistic act to be situated as a burning tree. Is this all a coincidence? Is this a hidden desire to simulate Cybele’s love for her own son, or is it rather your burning desire for your own regeneration and new origins? Or is this the way reality manifests itself as mythology? Is this the state of reality as of now, than may be as the Chinese believe we may find jade and gold – yang substances and symbols of immortality – by the light of burning Cypress resin. Yours, Anber