# HISTORY /// “A Palimpsest Called Paris: Schuiten and Peeters’s Urban Fictions” for DAMn 48

Les Halles de Baltard et le Paris perdu. Jour by François Schuiten, 2012 © Schuiten / Casterman

A PALIMPSEST CALLED PARIS: FRANCOIS SCHUITEN AND BENOIT PEETERS’S URBAN FICTIONS

Written for DAMN Magazine 48 (January 2015)

Originally a palimpsest was a parchment scraped numerous times to allow new layers of scriptures to be inscribed into its surface. The erasure was however never total, and archeologists consider such a document for its multiple layers of history gathered into one object. This notion of palimpsest can be perceived at the core of the vision proposed by François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters in their exhibition “Revoir Paris” at the Paris Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (November 20, 2014 – March 9, 2015). In it, the two graphic novelists mix speculative projects for Paris from the mid-19^th century to our era, with their own literary work that proposes visions of an…