The trench seen as a place capable to set words free. The excavation of the ground forces earth to speak, the sharp tool scratches a surface to inscribe letters, a scar on the skin is the document of an archive. The archaeological excavation, the writing and the archive demand to open up an incision, and the incision is a gesture that violates speech. In Kallio trenches remain silent. Everything is already said. History is recorded and the documents are released outside the incision, in an empty space that serves as their place of installation.
Their collection constitutes an awkward act which is probably excited by the same motivation that led archaeologists to pursue the excavations while the village was sinking. The revelation of an ancient place just to be recorded, before it’s buried once more. The weakness to continue and the denial to give up, drive to an almost haunted situation. Persistence to the record, to the deposit to the archive. The monument itself is fated to vanish and the archive can take its place. An idolatry of the document that can’t distinguish the distance between Kallio and its description. The place exists as long as it can exist on phrases.
The gesture that wants to delete it, eventually increases its importance. The erasure of the map motivates the writing on the entries of the archive. Kallipolis is being excavated because it is destined to sink. Kallion is being inscribed because it is destined to get erased. When the sinking is brought to completion, the pursuit is hooked on the archive records. The document of the lost place tends to gets more important than place itself. In its effort to elucidate, it empties space and stands alone to collect the gaze.
It determines frontiers, it imposes qualities, speaks about it, but the place is never there to reply. The Archive holds with the place a relationship whose positiveness originates from elimination and separation.Kallion, Kallipolis , Velouchovo, Kallio. Glorious ancient polis, medieval settlement, sunken village . Presents are only the definitions of a place which is always located somewhere else and here stands passive just to be inscribed on foreign catalogues.
The archive ends up as the collection of the indestructible absence of Kallio. It approaches the place by its displays, it almost breaks in it. It separates the finds and classifies them on its own rules, in fragmentary unities as they were not parts of a whole.The residence of the Archive is being isolated of the residential area and attains its own space as separate entry. It is the residence of the archive that offers Kallipolis its special value as a political center with connections that arrive to Egypt. The curving continues and the internal secedes of the external, the content of the container. Movable fragments, which have been saved and displaced, establish a different kind of find than the architectural remains that staying in place got covered of water. The seals of papyrus still stand inside our reality to present themselves. The object itself is the document. The chamber of the archive needs the mediation of the archaeological writing to represent itself. In the conversation with it a third term interferes and speaks on behalf of it. The chamber remains mute and stays pathless.
The documents of the drowned remnants offer an a priori knowledge. They inform about a place that doesn’t allow the touch. Writing separates itself of the image. Writing demands to suppress the image. It spares the reader with the representation of Kallion, its outline but not what it contains, its silhouette but not its face. Nothing is achieved except of an idle sight.The ancient remains are represented in the way of a thought or remembrance. The document seems to lie. It never offers what it promises.
The objects that have been saved are inserted in numerical lists and sent away from the place that produced them. Fragments of a lost earth, always refer to the part that is missing. They stand protected from the menace , although homeless, in the emptiness that surrounds them. Writing and image meet again, move in parallel, searching for an installation place.
The remnants of Kallipolis that still remain are few. Some parts of the wall are conserved above the lake.Memorials of a world that lost its threshold, memorials of an anarchic world. The laws of the archive , the suggested layout of reading, the numeration of documents seem to happen without a point. Haphazard series that can be transferred without disturbing the function of the archive.
When Kallio passes under the water a new threshold is realizable. With the aid of memory , Kallion can establish itself in the event. Not anymore as a lost ancient city but us a palimpsest that wants to protect the world which is hiding beneath it. The moment of sinking whisks the place of the live speech to the narration. It is the moment that defines the order of the archive. A section in time that allows Kallion to retain in silence, and in that way to speak legendary[i] . Its remnants offer the letters for the narration of its story, the one that has been and the one that will be. Like the Archive , Kallion leaves a promise. In the future, it shall speak. Its space is filled of discontinuances and reerections. It remains silent for the present waiting to repeat itself. Not in the nostalgic way of archaeologists, it doesn’t wish for a return but for a place that has never been born.