What was here before? What existed before the asphalt streets and buildings? Why is the lemon tree squeezed into the corner of the garden? If I follow the trees, can I connect to the history of the place?
We walk together with Eleni Burou a botanoligist, through Nea Ionia toward the uncovered section of the Podoniftis River in Nea Filadelfeia. The route passes through an industrial area layered with the silent, multicultural, migrant histories of the neighborhood. As we move, the trees and plants become our guides—Mulberry (Μουριά), Eucalyptus (Ευκάλυπτος), Bitter Orange (Νεραντζιά), Kumquat (Κουμκουάτ), Olive (Ελιά), Lemon (Λεμονιά), Pomegranate (Ροδιά), Rose Geranium (Αρμπαρόριζα). They offer another kind of archive. They speak of displacement and adaptation, of care, nourishment, and survival. They carry traces of the people who planted them, tended them, brought them from elsewhere.
Through cyanotype, we attempt to hold these traces. Leaves and stems leave their imprint on paper, forming a collective book of plants—a shared gesture of remembering. We ask: Do we see connections between the histories of forced displacement that shaped this neighborhood and the forces that continue to relocate people today? Do we know stories of communities gathering after rupture? Have we experienced collective kitchens, community gardens, or other forms of rebuilding connection? What does it mean to come together now? What forms of gathering feel necessary, possible, healing? We reflect on the early industrial histories of our countries of origin or current living, and how these histories intertwine with contemporary movements of labor and migration. Through shared stories and collective activation—through food, planting, walking, listening—we imagine ways of being together that are rooted in the land and in mutual care. The walk unfolds as a space of dialogue and embodied research, where plants become mediators between genealogies and ground.
This workshop is initiated and designed by Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki as part of the ongoing program of Mouries Collective Healing Exercises: Inherited and (e)merging women’s knowledges for collective learning and interspecies connection.