In May 2024, Panayiotis Michael and I removed the orange tiles from the space and found a mosaic floor. We weren’t surprised, since the building’s exterior base had already betrayed hidden layers of material. What looked like restoration was, however, something else. In thinking through what kind of (infra)structure we wanted to become, we first needed to sense the ground beneath our feet, not only as space but also as time.

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Terrazzo began as an economical solution: a way to bring marble residues and fragments of costly stone back to life. Cheap and quick to lay, it binds a mass of inorganic matter together with a binding agent such as concrete. Even in its most utilitarian form, it carries the residue of something else — the by-product of a costlier material given a second life, continually creating a new surface, so that no two tiles are ever exactly alike.

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In this specific locality, the terrazzo holds the trace of “home-grown” gravel and of a time not long past, carrying its histories with an unassuming presence. These histories point to two things at once: a period of rapid change that brought modernisation and commercialisation to the area, followed by its decline; and the history of interruption that divided Nicosia and left the residential flats on the building’s left-hand side to their first tenants, war refugees seeking temporary shelter. Many of them are still here today.

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Where the room’s rectangular geometry gives way to a diagonal slant, a visibly different terrazzo was laid at some point, likely filling in the trace of a removed wall. It is this line of tiles that most fascinated Marina Kassianidou, an artist whose sustained and sustainable practice collapses the poles of being-in-relation-to and being-in-resistance-to into painstakingly crafted demarcations in which attentiveness to the infinitesimal becomes a matter of positioning: of where and how one stands. Kassianidou is an artist with whom it makes perfect sense to ask what secrets a floor holds, and what futures it can become.

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Any infrastructure is bound to its local (hi)stories, or more precisely, to the different temporalities of acceleration and interruption it holds together. Oftentimes we feel compelled to audit these temporalities, as if they might yield increasingly interesting, even profitable returns. That yield is knotted to a speculation on the past and future, borrowing from both in order to structure the present. Every infrastructure, in this sense, is already a speculative labour: a bet that what has already been spent, built, or lost might still be made to yield a future it cannot yet see, but must act as though it can. It is this same wager that resonates with the way art-making is itself a form of “labour that negates capital by out-speculating it,” as Marina Vishmidt puts it in Speculation as a Mode of Production.

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What Vishmidt means by this is worth pausing on. She works from Adorno’s sense that art is doubled: it functions as a commodity in the fullest sense, and yet also holds open a space of non-labour, in which thought, selfhood, and collective life can still be worked out speculatively, before being fixed into value. On this basis, she identifies a shared speculative structure between art and capital, a kind of identity between them. But she insists this identity works against itself: to hold two things this close together is already to strain against collapsing their difference.

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Capital’s expansion is itself a speculative negation, a bet on future value that consumes present labour in order to realise itself. Labour’s answer, on Vishmidt’s account, is not refusal but escalation: not a decline to place a bet, but an attempt to outrun capital’s own rhythms. It is this excess – an overreach from within, rather than an opposition from outside – that gives art-making its critical purchase. Whether “infrastructure” is even the right term for what is happening here is worth holding open. That same excess that keeps unsettling any term meant to fix it in place, makes “ecosystem” perhaps the more workable frame: a field in continual flux, its presence accelerated by resonance and interrupted by practices of smooth reproductions of the same that mask the asymmetries of power they depend on to keep reproducing. It is here that Kassianidou’s actions within the space come most alive. Her “Aggregate” process is revealing of a paradox. It takes the room’s diamond geometry as a found horizontal and vertical axis, and the terrazzo tile at their meeting point as an inexhaustible surface, one on which the two senses of aggregate converge but are bigger than the sum of their parts: inorganic matter bound by an agent, and collective gathering itself.

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Floor Mediations, a series of four graphite drawings, centres on one of the later-added tiles with their finer aggregate matter, as if already a zoomed-out rendering of the rest. Kassianidou took this as a cue, returning again and again to the idea of magnification, turning the tile into a space of sustained study. The first drawing is a one-to-one rendering of the tile’s own dimensions. The second zooms in to the scale of the aggregate visible across the rest of the tiles in the space. The third and fourth push further, at an exponential rate, with the magnification accelerating with each step. All four hold to the tile’s own dimensions (30 × 30 cm), using that format as a lens or aperture through which to dive into the tile, to burrow inside it.

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What’s compelling is how this labour, in revealing an inexhaustibility, turns the hard surface of the tile into something porous and unfixed: a surface that keeps expanding the longer one focuses on it. The drawings translate a photograph of the tile into accumulations of graphite marks; the individual marks aggregate to reconstruct the tile. Moving from the one-to-one similitude toward the magnifications lets more imaginative, speculative decisions enter the process of marking. “I’m hoping that the drawings capture a movement from the more concrete/representational to the more abstract/speculative,” she writes.

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It is this move that opens onto the most fascinating space. While the mind searches for the perfect match, the eye begins to register that nothing, in fact, holds still. The process of marking delivers an essential critical distance, close to the sense Vishmidt gives that term: not a distance held apart from the work’s condition as object, but one reached only through it, and despite it. That distance changes the texture of what we were first trying to sense – the base beneath our feet – and opens onto processes of world-un-making.

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World-un-making is, in part, what this project sets out to do: to unthink the world, and in that unthinking, to glimpse other possible ways of being. It asks for a revelling in untapped energies, toward imagining alternate infrastructures and broader conceptions of public ecosystems, and the role of art within them. It is precisely these notions of publicness and ecosystem that are under most sustained attack at present since the cracks they open in the sentiment of dominance are being smoothed over too quickly, and with renewed vengeance. It is also worth keeping in mind Jack Halberstam’s critique of discourses of “world-making”: on the one hand, an urgent need to rebuild the world; on the other, the various forms of oppression that remain unthought under the heading of an abstract and total “world.” “But we can’t set up a utopian goal,” as he puts it, “because that thing to come has to be revealed through the process of unmaking.”

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Kassianidou’s Reverberations, a site-specific wall drawing, takes this up directly. The work recreates the crack in the recessed wall as a rhythmic repetition, referencing earthquake intensity diagrams and treating the crack as epicenter. Tremor strength decays roughly exponentially with distance from a quake’s source, and the drawing follows that logic: the crack is redrawn as a graphite mark at exponentially widening intervals. “The drawn lines closer to the crack follow its shape more closely, since I can see the crack and the completed lines while drawing,” Kassianidou notes. “As the lines move further away, I lose sight of the crack and of what I’ve already drawn, and the marks become more abstract and freeform.”

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The impulse for the work was as much optical as sonic. “While I was in the space in December 2025, I couldn’t help but notice the constant sound of construction going on all around. The space is dwarfed by taller buildings on all sides, hiding, holding out, in the middle of urban development”. What is notable is that Mitsis 3, the very complex that houses sic., was described in much the same terms during its own construction in the early 1970s.

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It is this constant change that brings us back to the base, and to the binding force of gravity. Kassianidou began considering the layers of dust, dirt, and debris on the tiles. A floor collects the remnants of what moves across it; gravity lets dirt, debris, hair, and other organic matter gather there. Everything a floor collects is but another order of aggregated marks, the value of which remains undecided. “I collected debris from the floors of the space (dust, bird feathers, bits of unidentified material, flecks of wall paint, tiny stones, hair) along with remnants of my own making process: pencil shavings, bits of eraser, wood shavings from cutting and drilling and sanding, scraps of paper, cat hair mixed through all of it. I used this to make monotype prints, letting the debris fall onto an inked gel plate, then pressing a sheet of paper against it by hand to capture the silhouettes of everything caught there.”

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Some of the resulting images resemble cell magnifications; others look more celestial. Kassianidou made one series from debris gathered on the ground floor, sized to that floor’s tiles (30 × 30 cm), and a second from debris gathered on the mezzanine, sized to its tiles (33 × 33 cm). What these monoprints hold moves close to a thought Hannah Arendt develops in her essay on Walter Benjamin, where she pays attention to Benjamin’s gift for treating what has already sunk and dissolved not as ruin but as promise — since, in her words, “the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization”: what sinks into the past does not simply disappear, but hardens into new, unfamiliar forms, waiting to be brought back to the surface. The debris underfoot, like the fragments a mind recovers from a sunken past, only wants surfacing. Not to be restored to what it was, but to be given, in its new form, a second life stranger than the first.