Documenting the Divide: Utilizing 3D Scanning to Negotiate Heritage, Memory, and Loss Within the Cypriot Buffer Zone

The small island nation of Cyprus has had a long history of conflict – one that is marked in the morphology of the urban environment and in the Buffer Zone that segregates the nation – a space of redaction in the Cypriot landscape, and an enduring spatial division between the north and south of Cyprus. The restricted access to the Buffer Zone currently limits quotidian memory practices and the ability to engage with both individual and collective meaning-making. This paper outlines a research project that we have been conducting within Cyprus to create an open-access digital archive and explore the potential of 3D scanning to enable new forms of engagement with cultural heritage and a sensitive negotiation of spaces of conflict and loss. Through this work, we explore the idea of heritage-as-negotiation, witnessing, and meaning-making that gives voice to past events that shape and haunt the present.