Tracing Angel’s Men (2025-ongoing)
Project Description
“Tracing Angel’s Men” is an art and research project responding to the photographic archive of American anthropologist John Lawrence Angel, who visited Cyprus in 1949. Angel was one of the leading authorities in forensic anthropology and an expert on human bones. After completing his analysis of skeletal remains at the Cyprus Museum, Angel travelled to Episkopi, where he studied human remains from the archaeological site of Kourion-Bamboula and conducted anthropometric research on local men. As part of this study, he photographed and measured over 80 men from the village. Today, this photographic archive is held by the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.
The project “Tracing Angel’s Men” retrieves the names and photographic portraits of these individuals and brings them back to the Episkopi community in an effort to trace their descendants and uncover the men’s stories. The concept of "tracing" lies at the heart of the project—both as a method and metaphor. The portraits were compiled into a “community album” that circulated among households of Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Episkopi and Zodia (where most Turkish Cypriots moved after the war in 1974), allowing descendants to contribute information and personal anecdotes, helping to reconstruct the lives and personalities of these men.
In addition, family photographs depicting them in everyday settings were collected and rephotographed, forming the basis of a new photographic archive.
This a work on progress and is expected to be completed in 2026.
Credits:
Research assistants: Thalia Efthymiou (collection of stories and photographs), Helia Zakeri (digitization of original archive)