User:Trashpuppy/Palimpsest

A PALIMPSEST is a surface used for repeated writing. The writing is erased when it has outlived its usefulness. The support, the manuscript page itself, has not outlived its usefulness as it is laboursome to create. While you can certainly clean the palimpsest, the old writing is never fully erased. While the current writing is legible, over time different earlier writings compete to come back to the surface of the palimpsest . The past writings still inform the makeup of the palimpsest.

The City is a palimpsest - stretching beyond merely the visual. The visible city scape covers up the past both in literal and figurative ways as it is the result of a constant process of writing, erasing and rewriting. The erasure has historically speaking often taken place in rather violent ways; the example that Ground Zero was not the first erasure on the site. Fristly, the displacement of Native Americans, later the construction of the twin towers that displaced Middle Eastern communities and the destruction of their former neighbourhoods.

What would we see when we see through and past the city? And see the fundaments it is built on?

“I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes”

Construction sites, sites of transformation, then form physical points in which traces of older writing can be seen and / or are actively covered up by new writing. This of course concerns the physical, historical traces as opposed to social history, lived experience.

<gallery