Aphrodism assesses the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus, its architecture, and its ability to divide and segregate a nation through the propaganda imposed by the island’s major powers (Greece and Turkey).

The myth of the goddess Aphrodite’s birth introduces and reveals how the celestial figure embodies Cyprus, challenging the repressive nature of borders by using mythology as a critical pedagogy. Thus, Aphrodism demonstrates how borders are associated with social injustice and cultural inequality, interpreting a border as an infrastructure enforcing segregation and using mythology as a moral metaphor promoting co-habitation.

The juxtaposition of mythology and boundaries emphasises how borders are fundamentally problematic due to the island’s socio-political and physiological functions and their impact on Cyprus’s architectural morphology. Thus, the project proposes reforming the Buffer Zone into a social affairs parliament, resolving frictions associated with co-habitation. The proposal enforces Cypriot society to get back in touch with their landscape promoting a symbiosis and symbiogenesis of the two communities of the island, the Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots.