repairing debt: The Broken Pitcher Forum

If reparations are inversions of debt, what would it take to repair the paradigm of private property? The Broken Pitcher Forum traces the entangled histories of debt and property law from the banks and commissioners at the center of the film The Broken Pitcher (2022) to the colonial land surveys, loans, and tributes that transformed land into collateral.

The public program will begin with the film's opening sequence, which follows the rise of home foreclosures in Cyprus after the 2012–13 financial crisis. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the film’s co-directors, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Marina Christodoulidou; writer and curator Adam HajYahia; and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. The discussion will be moderated by filmmaker and scholar Argyro Nicolaou. Followed by the Numismatics lecture-performance by Emiddio Vasquez.

The forum approaches the film as a departure point, tracing these foreclosures through longer colonial histories of property and ownership in dialogue with each speaker’s ongoing research, from the effects of austerity and real estate speculation on life in Athens, to the psychic, materialist, and aesthetic formulations of the condition of debt. This public program is presented as part of the group exhibition Mutable Cycles on view April 5 – May 25, 2025, curated by Ariana Kalliga at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

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Marina Christodoulidou is a curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work stems from grassroots initiatives and self-organized practices that traverse curatorial formats. Marina was a curatorial fellow at de Appel (2023–2024) and currently tutors for its COOP study program at the DAI. Marina has been part of the collaborative projects The Broken Pitcher (2020–) and Hope is a discipline (2023–), both of which are ongoing. Drawn to reimagining cooperative infrastructures and forms of place-making, she recently co-founded pitcherzzz, a Cyprus-based initiative, together with Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

Adam HajYahia is a writer and curator. His research and work focus on the aesthetics and politics of images, sound, and performance in the revolutionary context of Palestine and its region, psychoanalytic theory and labor, and negative economic speculation within contemporary art. He is currently Assistant Curator at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College, NY.

Argyro Nicolaou is a filmmaker and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work deals with the representation of history, displacement, and intergenerational memory in post-conflict, postcolonial societies, like her home country of Cyprus. Her work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image, Gallatin Galleries, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and Athens International Film Festival among others. Argyro holds holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, and has taught film and literature courses at Bard, Columbia and Princeton. She is a member of the European Film Academy, the International Documentary Association and the Directors Guild of Cyprus. She is also one of two Artistic Directors for Cyprus Film Days International Festival.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to resound diasporic infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the sociogenic accords of cognition. Recently she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the institute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr. She recently co-founded the Cyprus based initiative pitcherzzz together with Marina Christodoulidou.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is a New York-based anthropologist and filmmaker whose research interests include infrastructure, the environmental fallout of militarization, property ownership, platform capitalism, housing, and neurodivergence. Her remarks will draw on her fieldwork in Israel/Palestine and Greece and in particular on her second book project on the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership and speculation in Athens.

Emiddio Vasquez is a Cypriot-Dominican artist and musician. His practice engages with material transformations across media and serves as a strategy for engaging with the ideological infrastructures at stake. Without ever losing sight or interest in the human condition and its social reality, he reweaves personal memories, historical research and different materials, often through collaborative forms, to look at what subjects emerge from new forms of mediated sensing. As of 2018, he directs the Cypriot-based record label Moneda. Through record releases and sound events, the label looks at the conditions under which value reproduces itself in social, material and semiotic forms. And, along with Peter Eramian, he also works as Lower Levant Company (LLC), co-representing Cyprus in the 60th Venice Biennale.

For more information, call 845-758-7573, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/1076-mutable-cycles.

Time: 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema

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