Experienced Pebbles

In the 1960s, in the name of astyphilia and so-called progress, mass demolition of neoclassical houses and plebian dwellings took place, without any planning for preserving cultural elements, in order to build multi-storey buildings for the relocation of people in large urban centers. This act was later described as a “cultural crime”.

The products of those demolitions, either due to the absence of a management plan and an environmental protection legislation, or due to human irresponsibility, were dumped in the sea. This act was later described as an “environmental crime”. Much later, in 2004, coastal areas were ‘trashed’ for the construction of Olympic games facilities. (It was only in 2010 that a ministerial decision regarding the recycling of building materials, was issued).

These two burdensome practices were transformed by the power of nature. The sea with its ripples, friction and waves, brought to the urban beaches various pebbles, fragments which had experienced the human activities of the past.

At a nearby sandy beach, where I was enjoying my walks during the lockdown, I found such fragments, and although they came from an illegal activity, their beauty surprised me so much, that a question came over me: “How did two disgraceful acts, massive demolition and dumping of rubbles in the sea, create this beauty? ” Pebbles, witnesses of past aesthetics, spread on the sandy beach as an open-air Museum.

The rounded fragments, patterns from floor tiles of urban Neoclassical Architecture and the magnificent mosaics of the Folk Architecture, which are no longer made, are an aesthetic accepted and declared by experts to be of unique beauty.

This fragmentation of the “part” that comes from the “whole” as autonomous figures, I see, and I try to include them in a memory.