The spill, the fold, the spiral

In Athens borders follow people around. The colonial map weighs heavy, pressing down on people forced to move or unable to move or both. But the city gathers spatial imaginations, made of errantry and history and multiplicity, and the city becomes mobile. Here we write shapes and strategies that turn the city into a sea and the sea into a city. We write Mediterranean futures. We write the spill, the fold, the spiral.

A cartographic essay/prose poem (halfway between a map book and a chapbook) written from Athens with Kareem Alkabbani. Published in You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography issue on “Counter/Cartographies”, November 2023.

(The featured image on the homepage and above is a still from Meriem Bennani’s 2021 video, “Guided Tour of a Spill”, cited in the piece below.)