Non lethal weapon - Kasımpaşa street lights 

 View of the street: Işık Çıkmazı, Kasımpaşa, Beyoğlu, Istanbul 

Concept:

This street size project explores the potentials to implementing a public art project in a fast changing urban environment typical of any growing megalopolis. It tests how human network and empathy have become the first foundation for a public artwork.

Development:

Generally speaking a public-art project is realized in an existing context therefore it is interacting with a comprehensive urban environment, which includes architecture, as well as human, social and political factors.

However, over the past few years an important shift has obviously occurred in big cities. Globalized market economy, speculation and gentrification along with political agenda have leveled various cultural differences but at the same time it has raised new boundaries. Fast re-shaping city landscapes impact relationships between the inhabitants and local neighborhood dynamics. Space in a broad sense (both physically and mentally) is less available. Amazingly the more the city is expanding the less potential and alternatives are available.

Large parts of the urban fabric can no longer be possible places for various cultural projects’ realizations. Therefore different kind of collaboration strategies and implementation methods need to be developed to realizing public art projects.

In fact a site-specific realization can no longer be directly implemented in an existing site. The project’s foundation does not start from a solid structure but from the words that are exchanged between people. Human relationships, language and consequently trust are the original elements from which a project can shape its own contour. Beyond aesthetics and materials preferences, public art can first be completed if it is based on language, empathy and mutual recognition.

Description and implementation: the Kasımpaşa street neon light installation

This Kasımpaşa project is based on a local human network. The availability and approval of the neighborhood dwellers create the space where is implemented what will become visible.

Practically, I have first contacted “ustas” (local contractors) and people I previously knew and who are living in Kasımpaşa. From there, without any specific drawings, I have asked which buildings could be used for a light installation, where to get electricity, how to connect various urban components together, how to get equipments delivery, how to get food for the team.

After several days of encounters, a specific blueprint of this Mahalle has already been defined. The final result is a series of neon lines underlining urban fragments located in one street. Various lengths and colors changes will reveal a local network and how the inhabitants relate to one another.

In order to consolidate this approach, this project is realized by using only local fabricators, contractors and shops. The neon light material is a well-proven technique as well as a very common city signage but it is used for this project for a different goal.

This project starts with a human network that gives the foundation for a shape, which reveals the human links between people. As a result the project will show what is normally not visible by looking at the facades or by walking in the streets. It is like showing the roots of a tree without which it cannot grow.

This project can be understood as a reference to an early Gordon Matta Clark public art project, where he planted a tree in the basement of a building. It means that if art or any language can grow, it is because the roots are silently developing in the foundation. 

“Dallar – Rameaux” - Mardin Biennial 2010 (to my mother)

 View from the city center

For the first Mardin biennial, curator Döne Otyam has asked French artist Bertrand Ivanoff to design a specific light installation for this historical and ancient city.

The artist came several times in order to get acquainted with the population and the urban landscape. Ivanoff has chosen to work with a building located in the city center on the Cumhuriyet Meydanı (Republic Square). Even though this city has been almost untouched for centuries, this building is a typical 70’s concrete structure that was once a hotel.

« In various cities this kind of very banal building can be found. I wanted to use this former hotel because this concrete neutral architecture is a real time signature in the Mardin historical urban landscape »

Regarding the multi-cultural and multi-religious heritage, the artist turned the building into a support for a universal symbol of peace, tolerance and eternity.

On the facades, long broken branch like lines are wrapping the architecture in a green glowing color that reflects in the city center square after sunset. Going around and inside balconies, the neon lights seem to grow like an organic material.

Ivanoff has planted a tree of light that brings a poetic and fresh dimension in the heart of the city. It operates like magic as the title of the biennial suggests.

The challenge for the biennial team and the artist was also the complete such a large-scale project in a context no so familiar with public art.

« This has been the most interesting part of the project, which required a lot of collaboration and solidarity. People in Mardin showed tremendous availability and will to make the all thing possible. Because such project is completed on site, it creates a local dynamic which confirms that public art, whatever the context is, can be a fabulous vehicle for exchanges and human encounters » says the artist which conclude by expressing his faith that all the human commitment and collaboration is carried out by the project and therefore noticeable by the viewers.