Here in Athens everything is layered. Like a moussaka made from history. I’m sitting down eating one right now, looking at it with a random Tavros (a small area of Athens) street as a backdrop. Its few layers of meat, wheat and other ingredients tell a story of its making, a short timeline of human activity, while the layers of the city behind it span a longer one. The most in-your-face version of this layering, and the one closest to my moussaka, is of course the layers of spray paint covering almost every wall of Athens. Like the dish, each coat sits on top of the last, and the whole thing only makes sense if you take it in as a stack, one layer at a time.

This kind of surface can be viewed in various ways. When people like or dislike Athens this specific application of paint often becomes a symbol for their arguments, either as a romantic chaos or an urban form of human dirt. Maybe to a conservative a sign of moral decline, or to a socialist a sign of economic decline. Naturally, a society lacking the economy to, on a societal level, fund the cleaning of facades will see an increase in these surfaces. Maybe because of moral decline, but more likely due to the fact that these surfaces accumulate over time unless removed. I passed a wall the other day that was time stamped with 2010 by its maker, one layer with a date on it, sitting under everything sprayed since.

This is in no way a unique quality of Athens as such. Graffiti as a form of expression and landscape exists everywhere in various degrees. For me it becomes more interesting as an analogy for the layering of history.
As an artist I have long been in awe at the magic that time creates. The beauty of one of my workbenches in my studio, beaten and tainted by hours of work, is something that I cannot replicate in a single painting. It is a testament to spontaneous aesthetics arising from a whimsical expression of time. As soon as you try to replicate it, this quality is lost, even in the most calculated art projects.
In this sense I might lean into the stupidity of romanticising chaos.

Nevertheless, I think my reason for this is the possibility of reading history through the aesthetic alone. As a visual archaeologist I trust that there is an absolute truth in the visual, at least true enough to be a foundation for our judgement of the physical world we inhabit. I am aware that this trust is not innocent. In my last text I documented objects that seemed to die as soon as I captured them, and I suspected then that my own idea of reality colonized what I saw. Reading a wall is not so different: I bring my own layers to it. But the trust is still where my work begins, because the alternative is to not look at all.

The Mediterranean area is a rich tapestry of this kind of visual archaeology, especially for us that live in the world of cities, societies and empires and because of this are used to interpreting its obtuse aesthetic. In Istanbul, Athens or Beirut the archaeological project of collecting any artifact connected to the past of the city would mean deconstructing the city itself. It simply is not feasible. Instead, inhabitants of these places live in the rubble of empires collapsed and reimagined, worlds forgotten and again worlded. You might dig a grave for your dog in the backyard and find an old plate. And with old I mean 4000 years old.

In the area Keramikos in Athens you can visit the archaeological dig site of the historic Keramikos: a graveyard and ceramic factory and many other things through history. At one point, 2000 years ago, the walls to the area were constructed of old pieces of rock and monuments lying around, some in an Egyptian style, others in a Persian one. It is unclear where they came from, and based on the abundance of such objects, the late antiquity constructors of a new wall would use them to build. A layer made out of layers.

Two years ago I spent 3 months in New York. A fantastic stay that was made even better by the amount of genuinely creative and dreaming people I encountered. It is also a city of fast paced mutation. As teenage mutant ninja turtles it feels as if the city in cycles gets covered in mutagen and transforms into a new form unseen. An artist loft becomes a bank. A factory turns into a boxing club. A fancy area becomes a crack street. In each transformation a small hint of its history remains, a small tint of the original wall paint still visible if you closely study the Biggie mural. New York layers quickly, in other words. What it cannot do is layer deeply.

Despite this, as time passes and the traces of it fade, you realize the shallow history that is the American city. It is not to say these are worth less, or that they do not possess other qualities to replace the layering of thousands of years of culture. These kinds of cities are, in the great scheme of things, cities of adolescence: energetic, unburdened, free to reinvent themselves without asking permission from a past they do not really have. The benefit is speed; the challenge is that there is nothing underneath the newest layer to catch you if it fails.

Athens has experienced adolescence and old age many times over and, like Keramikos, reshaped itself on top of its own grave. There is a certain stability in a place like this despite its contemporary status. It seems almost like a continuous cycle that has repeated since the origin of civilization, where ingrained in its structure is the presence of not only the past but also a promise that new layers will continue to form.

For the past 20 years the term “slum lord” has been popular when discussing gentrification, describing house owners that let old buildings decay to the point where it is not reasonable to keep a building alive anymore, and instead construct new, increasing rents and inviting wealthier inhabitants. I think that while most people engaged in this issue argue against the expulsion of a working class to make room for an elite, there is also a notion of how an erasure of history is taking place. When the demolition crane comes, the 2010 tag goes to the landfill along with the wall it sat on, and the dead go with it.

Seen through this, the shiny reality formed by our contemporary capitalist world is a reduction of history, detaching the layers of the timeline of societies to an eternal ‘Now’ where its aesthetic is not allowing the organic growth on top of the previous moss but instead aiming to tear down and reconstruct.

A city can never be more than its people, living or dead, and when the dead are expelled to an invisible graveyard we can neither honor our past nor use it to construct our future. Likewise, it tells of how the places riddled with the ruins of humanity’s past exploits might be just the places where the formation of a possible future can root.

I have now finished my moussaka and drunk the last of the beer from my bottle. The city has moved slightly forward in its continued history, as happens all over the world. No matter if it is good or bad or fun or boring, this past hour, all over the world, a thin varnish of history is added. The depth and knowledge that come with living in realities where these layers are allowed to remain is not only admirable and flavourful. It might be the single most important quality for building something that is not only a reflection of our contemporary selves, but of a human entity larger than that.