Lower Levant Company (LLC)
A research project by Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian.The Levant Company, after which the LLC project is named, served as a model for first wave capitalism in the region. By establishing trading alliances between the British, Venetians and the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century and setting up factories across the Eastern Mediterranean in cities such as Aleppo, Smyrna, Cairo, Algiers, Larnaca and Salonica, the company was instrumental in the colonisation of the New World.
Despite its eventual demise, the company’s structure in many ways prefigures the contemporary organisation of trade and financial capital in the region, but also the historical developments of Cyprus towards its independence. In that sense, LLC considers ways to recontextualize the geopolitical forces that still permeate the island, across scales and agencies, while challenging the colonialist narratives that exclude Cyprus from its cultural and geographic vicinity.
The inclusion of “Lower” in the name recalibrates the company’s original ambitions to the project’s own commitment to a practice of material and political regrounding; one that reorients its scope in relation to the land, subterranean activities, and extractivism that operate on the island in the present moment. Through varying media and contexts, the notion of ‘research’ is further dispelled from its rigid academic associations and reclaimed as a mode of rigorous thinking about social reality. This first instigated working together and then reaching out to others; in other words, not doing "political work", but doing work politically.
Co-representing Cyprus in the 60th Venice Biennale, along with Endrosia Collective and Haig Aivazian with the exhibition: On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare...