Common Currents

Common currents is a cine-concert that stages a dialogue between British travelogue footage and home movies of Lebanon and Cyprus, accompanied by a live folk music performance by Zenonas Economides. The performance brings together two archives rarely seen side by side: the travelogue, with its aerial shots and postcard framing, built to present Lebanon and Cyprus through an ‘oriental eye’, coastlines and ruins arranged for a viewer who was never meant to live there; and the home movies shot by the people who actually did. Lebanon and Cyprus are presented here as two coastlines shaped by shared currents of trade and migration. Performed live by Zenonas Economides, folk music becomes a third voice in this exchange: it responds, interrupts, erupts. It traces melodies that moved between island and mainland long before any travelogue thought to point a camera at them, and at times it corrects what the oriental eye left out or flattened into scenery.