Pavle Mijuca | A Dizzying Palimpsest

“A Dizzying Palimpsest” is a research-based project that evolved into a performance during the Onassis AiR residency. It examines the urban landscape of Athens, focusing on spatial phenomena and urban planning challenges such as gentrification, touristification, and urban sprawl. Amid rapid expansion and infrastructural demands, the city’s growth often unfolds at the expense of local communities and fragile green spaces. Engaging with these dynamics, the work reconsiders contemporary Athens through the visionary yet underappreciated lens of architect and urbanist Takis Zenetos. Despite limited acceptance during his lifetime, Zenetos remains a seminal figure whose radical interventions confronted the absence of coherent urban planning, the proliferation of monumental architecture, environmental neglect, and reductive, short-term urban solutions. His legacy persists in a fragmentary architectural presence: partially realized, partially erased.

The performance traces the layered, often obscured history of the former Fix Brewery, now transformed into the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST). It unfolds as a speculative monologue through the imagined perspective of architect Takis Zenetos, whose visionary relationship to modernity becomes a lens for revisiting the building's shifting identities. Through this voice, the work excavates episodes of the brewery's evolution, illuminating a history that remains fragmented, half-forgotten, or deliberately smoothed over by Athens’ rapid urban transformations. By tracing the building's architectural mutations across decades, the performance reveals how each intervention (industrial, political, or cultural) has inscribed new meanings onto the site. These successive layers extend outward into the broader narrative of Athens itself, offering a portrait of a city continually rewritten by reconstruction, crisis, and adaptation. “A Dizzying Palimpsest ultimately invites viewers to reconsider this site as a living archive of the city's own restless metamorphosis."

My research began with a series of site visits to some of Takis Zenetos's remaining buildings in Athens. The first I visited was the Agios Dimitrios School, also known as the “Stroggylo.” During the visit, and in conversation with the school staff, the word “emblematic” surfaced again and again. It was there that I understood how much acknowledgement and gratitude the daily users of this building hold for the architect himself, for his idea and his vision. This has everything to do with how attentive Zenetos was to the future of the building: he designed it to be fully adaptable to needs and uses that had not yet arrived. Only then did I begin to grasp his sensibility, and the way he imagined buildings continuing to develop long after they were finished.

Over the following weeks I moved between his remaining buildings, traced his demolished houses across maps until I knew where they had stood, and located where his unrealized projects were meant to rise. I read essays and theory from architects and urban planners, and slowly placed Zenetos in time, watching his work unfold against the political weather of Greece in the 1960s and 1970s. I also had the chance to meet and learn from Panos Dragonas, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, and Heracles Papatheodorou: each gave me their reading of Zenetos and the way his works are perceived today. By then the shape of things had settled in my mind: I could see how his buildings belong to the Athenian landscape, and how he made each one adapt to the city while quietly reshaping it in return.

After some time in Athens, I grew eager to learn more about the Zenetos building I passed every day on my way to Onassis AiR in Neos Kosmos: the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), formerly the FIX Brewery on Syngrou Avenue, which Zenetos designed together with Margaritis Apostolidis. What struck me most was how different the building appears in person after seeing it so many times in archival photographs on my laptop. The first two things I noticed were its volume (its sheer length) and a strikingly red entrance. In the old images, the building seemed far longer, and I realized that the entrance had not originally been on Kallirrois Avenue but on Syngrou. That was when I began to read more closely about the building, and found that my observations were correct: the original really had been twice the length. The building had been cut, rebuilt, and rewritten, and the more I learned, the more its history began to spin. What gripped me was not the design so much as everything that came after: the years following the brewery's departure, the abandonment, the interventions, all of it pressing the building into the form we recognize today, down to the curious fact that only two of its four façades are under heritage protection. It was then that I recognized both the urgency and the potential to turn my focus toward this building, and to make it the subject of the performance to follow. Through it, I could intertwine so much of what can be said about Athens: its history of urban planning, its modernization, its architecture, and the way such modernist heritage is treated today.