Artist's Statement

Abstract

The constant alteration of cultural identities accompanies our imaginings of the city. Questions like “What is a city?”, “Who am I in it?”, and “Who is the Other?” touch on the issue of social boundaries and emotional mapping. Comparisons of the city to the body as expressed in architecture, design, and urban planning vary, but the city as a site of emotions is often left unexplored. City is about the organic urban body. Although high-rise and masculine in architecture, city expresses the female in its desires, memory bites, emotions, and sensuality. In applying the concept of the human body to the city, the awareness of the fact that emotions are visually stored in the city’s public sphere is heightened. The city itself becomes the canvas for intimate dialogues. It is suggested that the experience of a skin-to-skin contact with the physicality of the streets, once we allow ourselves to consciously be in touch with the city, leads to inevitable changes in the construction of our outlook on our urban environment. On the one hand, the occurring transformation can be a positive and liberating experience as depicted in spatial experiences based on the sensuality and ecstasy of the city. On the other hand, there is the intimacy with the street that results in prostitution and homelessness, linked with displacement and disembodiment in society. If the city is regarded as a space that consists of energy forms rather than as a fi xed constant, its fl uidity and performative actions are expressed in a free-fl ow of excessive energies that create connections. Such a hybridity is a fl uid concept structured around the presence, absence, and ambivalence of roots, and air relates to such a spatial discourse based on accounts of the fl esh, fantasies, and dreams that encompass histories and identity formations. We are emotionally involved when we are in touch with something. Emotions move us, metaphorically and in literary terms, from one place to another, and every journey consists of encounters and actions like departing, meeting, staying. There is a way of mapping space that does not need to fulfi ll