PALIMPSESTS OF NARVA
Spatial Installation + Urban Furniture Design
Palimpsest of Narva is a spatial intervention that reimagines the erased architecture of Old Narva not through reconstruction, but through resonance. In a city where so much has been lost, memory does not live in monuments instead it flickers between ruins and recollection, between the weight of rubble and the lightness of what once stood.
This proposal begins with a cartographic gesture: historical cadastral maps of Narva’s pre-war fabric are used to identify the original locations of destroyed homes. These footprints are neither romanticized nor rebuilt, instead, they are reactivated through a constellation of sculptural traces.
Gabion walls, filled with shattered concrete fragments, rise from the exact outlines of these lost houses. The concrete is painted in archival tones drawn from the domestic facades of Old Narva — soft ochres, greys, blues — allowing color to become a mnemonic device. These material remnants do not replicate the past, but instead metabolize it: the rubble becomes a new wall, a syntax of collective resilience.
Threaded through this new topology are skeletal lines formed in powder-coated steel: arches, gables, window frames. They do not attempt to restore what was lost but to invoke its absence, line drawings in space that hover between architecture and sketch, weight and air, the visible and the remembered.
Rather than enshrining loss in static form, Palimpsest of Narva offers a framework for memory that is active, provisional, and open-ended. It resists closure. This is not a monument to what was, nor a replica of what is no longer, but a spatial proposal that acknowledges absence while assembling new presence from it. The work invites the public not to passively remember, but to participate in the unfinished process of the city’s becoming. In this way, Palimpsest of Narva unfolds as both an archive and a site of construction — a structure built not on forgetting, but on the shared act of remembering otherwise.
