ADMA 2025-2026

Layers of Identities at the Threshold to Fortress Europe

What does it mean for a building to hold multiple and shifting identities through its abandonment? To become, at once, a shelter and a border, a space of waiting, both temporary and permanent?

Layers of Identity began as a broader inquiry into spaces across Crete, the island I come from, that have been caught within Europe's border regime, from an exhibition hall, to a swimming pool, to a port, even a remote island(1), and how these spaces lose their previous identities while taking on new, uncertain ones.

During the program, the research narrowed its focus to a single site, to the Agyia Exhibition Center in Chania, a building whose function has repeatedly shifted in response to changing conditions. Originally designed as a regional market for agriculture, later converted to an exhibition center, it has been continuously reactivated through successive moments of crisis.(2) Most recently, the Greek state designated it as an arrival center, one of several makeshift spaces activated in response to increasing migration flows, in the absence of any organized reception infrastructure.

The project is situated at the intersection of architecture, adaptive reuse, and border politics. It approaches the building as an active witness to broader political transformations. The history of the Agia Exhibition Center reveals how economic instability, migration policies, and changing governmental priorities become inscribed onto the built environment. Each new condition redefines the building's role, leaving behind traces that coexist with previous ones.

The urgency of this research emerged alongside recent developments in Crete, which has become one of the main arrival points in Greece.(3) As I followed the building's history, however, the research expanded beyond migration alone. It became an inquiry into how societies respond to crisis through architecture, and how abandoned infrastructures are repeatedly mobilized to absorb situations of emergency, without ever being designed to do so.

Throughout the process, questioning my own position became central to my approach. During my first visit to the Agyia Exhibition Center in December 2025, I expected to encounter an abandoned building.(4) Instead, I arrived at a moment of new arrivals.(5) While moving around the site, I was free to enter, leave, observe, and circulate. The people inside were not. This asymmetry was difficult to ignore and difficult to know what to do with.

It also raised a more uncomfortable question.

What gives me the right to research this space at all?

As a European citizen, an architect, someone who can choose to be there and choose to leave, I occupy a position of privilege in relation to everything this building holds. I became uncertain whether my presence risked reproducing the same extractive logic I was trying to critique. Influenced by discussions on positionality, situated knowledge, and Édouard Glissant's (6) notion of opacity, I became increasingly interested in what remains partially hidden, inaccessible, resistant to explanation and in how architectural research might acknowledge these limits.

These questions did not resolve. They became part of the research itself.

The research began with archival investigation, site visits, and photography, piecing together the building's history as if assembling a puzzle, where some parts were missing and others contradicted each other, including an attempt to measure the building in steps, using my body as a tool. Through diagramming, I tried to reconstruct a timeline, but the layers kept appearing simultaneously. This led me toward a genealogical approach, inspired by Michel Foucault's reading of genealogy, which refuses linear narratives and traces. Through a maquette, I attempt to construct this as a spatial form, where photographs, archives, thoughts, and reflections coexist.

Footnotes:

1- Agyia Exhibition Hall and Gavdos: https://rsaegean.org/en/crete-gavdos-7336-refugee-arrivals-h1-2025/ Swimming pool of Akrotiri: https://www.newsbeast.gr/greece/arthro/6604550/sto-kleisto-kolymvitirio-akrotirioy-filoxenoyntai-70-anthropoi-poy-diasothikan-sta-chania Rethymno port: https://www.neakriti.gr/kriti/rethymno/2126868_sto-limani-toy-rethymnoy-paramenoyn-oi-442-metanastes-poy-entopistikan-tin

2- https://panetaik.gr/en/the-company

3- ‘Crete continues to be the main entry point (44% of sea arrivals), including a rise in people from conflict-ravaged Sudan.’ https://gcr.gr/en/gcr-reports/item/paidia-poy-metakinoyntai-episkopisi-katastasis-3/

4- https://www.cnn.gr/ellada/story/496632/adeiazei-i-agyia-xanion-anaxoroyn-apo-ti-soyda-oi-teleftaioi-364-metanastes

5- https://en.parapolitika.gr/greece/122303/crete-over-720-migrants-at-agyia-exhibition-center-after-new-arrivals-crushing-pressure/