DREAM TREE

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Two years ago, I discovered a source of spontaneous and inmost poetic expression from refugees who live a period of their lives in abandoned industrial spaces, thanks to the precious work of the photographer Yiannis Tyrovolas. These poetic forms engraved on the walls, include, in particular, short poetic texts and reflections by the residents of these buildings, as well as sayings and verses from the Koran or medieval Persian poetry, sometimes accompanied by drawings, and often signed and dated. They are written in Arabic, Farsi, and Somali, but some are also in English. Yiannis Tyrovolas had them translated by cultural mediators and interpreters, native speakers, working with refugees in NGOs, and the translation revealed the nature and the variety of the texts.

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How can we conceive of this creation engraved on the walls of these abandoned places? These places aren’t they transformed from forsaken places fallen into oblivion into places of collective memory, through poeisis? Especially since this same place, the building itself, becomes the material of writing.

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In conditions where one feels invisible, absent to the others, and among anonymous traces of materiality (rubbish, clothing), the texts engraved on the walls with signature and date (the latter often in English even when the text is in the mother tongue) might generate traces of the individuals' existence, sometimes freeing them from anonymity: “I am here; I’ve been here; I exist.”

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This could be only one of the paths to explore in the study of the refugees’ poetic creation in these abandoned places, where several artistic acts take place and several creators act - in resonance? in counterpoint? - and have acted at different times, sometimes forming a true palimpsest. Tyrovolas’ photographic documents collected over nearly twenty years make it possible to access and study the similarities and differences of this palimpsest which, besides, puts this particular artistic and literary creation into a historical perspective.

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Within this line of reflection, I am preparing a presentation at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France, November 2025, where I analyze this kind of creation, based on:

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• contemporary archeology which studies the material traces of the recent past

• theory of linguistic landscapes which explores the links between language written in public spaces and historicized identities.

• ethnopoetics, focusing on the linguistic devices used in the verbal art outside the Western tradition.

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The 15-minute gripping video Dream tree, is a precious representative sample of Tyrovolas’ work, the photos of the abandoned buildings and the texts on the walls, but also two poems of the photographer, inspired by his encounters with refugee residents in the abandoned factories, during the photographic process, all accompanied by music. Thus, his voice is attuned to the refugees’ voice, in a symbolic way. This so dense in images, thoughts and emotions documentary combines the lyric and the social, the cultural and the profoundly -not gross- political, and thus the profoundly human. And there is where we can all reach each other.

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Iphigenia Moulinou

Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistic Anthropology,

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Dept. of Communication and Media Studies, National Kapodistrian University of Athens.

imoulinou@hotmail.com