permanently marked, 2018, 76x220 inches, National geographic world maps from 1940 to 2010, black permanent markers.
From a distance, the wall appears as a dark, silent plane—absorbing light and refusing entry. It reads as a dense, impenetrable void. But at close range, something begins to surface. Beneath accumulated layers of ink, faint cartographic traces emerge. Printed between the 1930s and 1990s—a period marked by repeated and often violent reconfigurations of borders—these coastlines and place names persist as residual inscriptions. Here, covering becomes a method of preservation, producing a palimpsest in which erasure and inscription are no longer distinct. The surface does not simply conceal what lies beneath; it records the very act of concealment itself. The ink accumulates rather than replaces, layer upon layer, until visibility becomes conditional on proximity and duration of looking. From afar, the viewer encounters opacity. Up close, fragments become legible—borders dissolved, territories renamed, geographies reshaped by war, ideology, and time. Cartography has always functioned as an instrument of power, asserting control through the organization of land and people. In this work, that logic is suspended. The maps are neither preserved nor destroyed, but held within a palimpsestic condition of continual overwriting—where history remains present precisely through its obscuration.
