Stone reuse is a recurring theme in my visual art and writing. I explore how stone and concrete carry layered economic, political, and emotional meanings – shaping interior and exterior spaces that both divide and connect, shelter and exclude.
While this body of work originated with Cypriot historical narratives and lore, the questions it raises extend beyond Cyprus, engaging with the shifting cultural and material values assigned to architectural elements, including sections of the Berlin Wall.

In the 19th century, medieval and classical monuments in Cyprus were dismantled, their stones poached, sold, transported and variously used in the construction of the Suez Canal. The Stones of the Suez Canal project reflects on this history through artist talks, publications, drawings and installation. One of these works, The Middle Way, reimagines the edges of the canal in silhouette drawings from these plundered Cypriot structures. They become metaphors for the material and symbolic exchanges that shaped the canal’s creation. As part of my research, I crossed the Suez Canal aboard the COSCO Vancouver in search of these displaced stones. The photograph above shows the cobbled embankment at el Ballah Bypass in 2007 – one of the few possible places where they might still have been visible until the canal expansion of 2014.

Another work on a related theme, A Wall is Made of Other Walls / A Wall is a Quarry (2012/2016), examines the reuse of stone in the Venetian fortification walls of Nicosia, Cyprus. These imposing walls are emblematic of the city today. In the late 16th century, Venetian builders dismantled public and private structures, including homes, churches and monasteries, to build these defensive walls in anticipation of the Ottoman siege. Despite the urgency and scale of the project, the walls failed to prevent a massacre of Nicosia’s inhabitants. Exhibited at the Petach Tikvah Museum of Art in 2017, the projection questions the material and symbolic costs of such fortifications. It considers how domestic architecture was sacrificed for military defence—and how, centuries later, small-scale poaching of those same stones hint at their gradual return to private living spaces.

One of the most striking examplese of material reuse is found in the fate of the Berlin Wall after German reunification.
While painted fragments entered museums and souvenir markets, most of the unmarked concrete was crushed and repurposed as the roadbed for the Ostsee Highway, which connects Rostock and Wismar. Construction began in 1992. The multi-channel video installation X and Y to Z reflects on this transformation—how concrete that once enforced division was later used to enable connection. A clip from the installation can be viewed (here). It was first exhibited during my artist residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.