Throughout history, islands have been treated as distinct places and, with this, the idea of insularity – belonging to/being of an island – has been romanticised and associated with otherness. But insularity can also be a story of connections: the sea can provide links rather than divisions, motivating and maintaining informal and formal connections both to other islands and to the mainland.
Both in the past and the present, ‘being an islander’ is a highly fluid state of being. Whether consciously or not, it is a form of social expression, with one’s sense of belonging to a group based on similarities and differences. For the past few years, our interdisciplinary research project (‘Being an Islander: art and identity of the large Mediterranean islands’, 2019-2023) has been investigating precisely this subject, and how ‘insularity’ affected and shaped art production and creativity, architectural evolution, and movement of people, using Crete, Cyprus, and Sardinia as case studies. A new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, one of the outcomes of the project, brings together more than 200 objects from the three Mediterranean islands (most of them never exhibited outside their regional museums) that tell exceptional stories of insular identity over a period of 4,000 years, from the Early Bronze Age to the Late Roman period. Rather than the modern political boundaries, through which we witness islands today, we aim to think of the Mediterranean islands and the sea that surrounds them in terms of connectivity and mobility. We have approached island identity, art, and cultural expression as a dynamic interplay shaped by social and historical episodes, rather than geography.
The relationship between people and things is what reveals important aspects of the islands’ identity. The Fitzwilliam Museum is home to an exceptional collection of Cypriot antiquities, but it has few holdings of Cretan antiquities and none from Sardinia. The loans from Crete and Sardinia allow our Cypriot collections to enter a dialogue with the material culture of the other two islands, revealing unique aspects of the islanders’ everyday life, identity, community structures, rituals and beliefs, language and scripts, and the ways they approach death and memory of their ancestors.
Secret Tunnels