When leaving the camps refugees had to make their own bricks to build their houses. House, a place of safety and refuge, is seen as a reduced image of the world. Carrying the trace of its owner’s lives and background it incorporates symbolic resonances that identify it with its inhabitants. Constructed from the bricks of my family’s first house in Greece, the block features a recreation of a byzantine fresco on its west side. A fragment of gold disk created with the traditional technique alludes to a martyr’s halo. Gold leaf that is applied using the method of byzantine iconography stands traditionally as a representation of the divine light. As artist exhales on the clay surface, the breath’s humidity activates glue in order for the gold sheet to stick on. In Byzantine Art this process symbolises the creation of humankind: God forms man from the ground and breaths into him the ‘breath’ of life.

Exploring the conflicts, oppression and violence, the wall is attacked and scratched as a reference to the destruction of Christian monuments and humiliation of faith. With clay symbolising human flesh, an analogy of attack converts wall marks to wounds, depicting the unnameable brutality suffered. Layering recalls events faded over time, showing the scars left behind and providing evidence about a country that has been built on the shoulders of martyrs.