The City That Forgot Itself

On the slow erasure of place, and what remains when the paint dries and the last tenant locks the door behind her

There is a particular shade of peeling ochre on the back wall of a shuttered bakery on Kanalstraat that I have been unable to forget. I first saw it in November of 2019, walking through the eastern quarter of a city that had not yet decided whether it was dying or merely sleeping. The plaster had cracked in long vertical fissures, revealing darker layers beneath—terracotta, then raw brick, then something older and unnameable. Each layer was a decade of intention, painted over by the next tenant's optimism.

The Weight of Surfaces

We speak of cities as though they are permanent things. But every building is a palimpsest—layers of intention written over one another until the original text is anyone's guess. The landlord repaints. The municipality rezones. A fire takes the third floor and what grows back is not the same building but a commentary on it. I spent two weeks last winter cataloguing the facades of the old textile district, photographing each one in flat afternoon light, and what struck me was not the decay itself but how deliberate it looked: as though the buildings had chosen to shed their skin.