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Markos Ntemkas’s residency at WAC25 explored the layered histories of the Prespa region through walking as resistance and remembrance. Born and raised in nearby Kastoria, Ntemkas brought intimate knowledge of the region’s complex past—a borderland touched by Ottoman rule, two world wars, two Balkan wars, and a civil war whose wounds remain unhealed in Greek society.
White Pages
Through daily conversations with residents of Agios Germanos and the surrounding villages, Ntemkas uncovered a forgotten chapter of post-civil war history: the “White Pages” (Lefki Selida)—special identity cards required for movement in border regions. These documents restricted residents to a 30-kilometer radius from their homes, part of a broader control regime along Greece’s borders aimed at stabilizing the country’s geographical and political situation.
For communities already marked as “communist” and speaking languages other than official Greek, this surveillance created deeply oppressive conditions. Ntemkas’s artistic response took the form of a 5.5-hour walk tracing a route of resistance—a path that would have avoided the control checkpoint at Koula, crossing the entire lakeside peninsula to reach Psarades from behind.
The walk unfolded along the white stones of the receding shoreline, landscape newly exposed by climate change. These white stones became the artist’s “White Papers”—the sound of footsteps on stone transforming a path of political resistance into a meditation on memory, place, and belonging.
Process & Community
Ntemkas deliberately chose to stay in Agios Germanos, away from the main WAC25 activities in Psarades, to immerse himself in daily life with local residents. His research method was conversational and collaborative—working with the village librarian, elders who remembered the control regime, and local historians including Professor Ziogas and Michalis Petrakos to piece together this suppressed history.
The work emerged from consensus, dialogue, and coexistence—the same principles that ground Ntemkas’s broader walking practice and his belief in creating dynamic networks of relationships through art.
Significance
White Pages represents a deepening of Ntemkas’s practice, marking his first sustained engagement with a place-based community. The work demonstrates how walking art can excavate silenced histories while the landscape itself—transformed by climate crisis—becomes both archive and escape route, offering new pathways through contested terrain.
Credits
MARKOS NTEMKAS
APA style reference
Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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