There is a museum in Rome that is easy to walk past.

From the outside, the Crypta Balbi sits quietly on a street corner, its signage understated, nothing to prepare you for what is inside. I was wandering around the city a few years ago and almost did not stop.

I am glad I did.

Once you go in, you take stairs downward. And then you see it: the layers. Roman foundations at the bottom, then medieval, then Renaissance, then modern Rome sitting on top of all of it. Each era built on what came before, adapted it, sometimes without even knowing what was underneath. The people who laid those first foundations had no idea that one day, somewhere above them, someone would build the Colosseum.

I studied history, and later did my MA in Leiden. I have always been drawn to how things accumulate: how each layer makes the next one possible, not by design, but by being solid enough to build on.

I recognise that in the work I do. The clarity that gets built conversation by conversation, the small shifts that compound over time, the conditions that make the next thing possible. In work, in collaboration, in how we show up for each other. None of it looks dramatic from the outside. Often it looks like an ordinary building on a quiet street corner.

But underneath, the layers are there.What has quietly accumulated in your own work that you only notice when you stop and look?