For a number of years, Can Altay has been documenting ways in which his urban environment of Ankara is ‘mis-used’, or alternatively ‘made the most of’ by its inhabitants. MiniBar, an ongoing project, surveys a group of people who accommodate the gaps between residential or commercial apartment buildings to form social drinking spaces. They return to these places time and again to meet up in the evenings, until the residents, police, or local authorities move them on. The ‘Minibar’ then shifts and is reformed elsewhere, again creating and shaping a new space for the continuation of the protagonists’ activities. Altay, who studied and now teaches architecture, describes this phenomena as: “a doing of architecture, by undoing the very architecture that provides the grounds for the act. It is not about undoing the architecture physically, because just by being there the people who initiate the ‘Minibars’ shape the space that they use. In contrast, it is the residents’ interventions, generated in order to eliminate the ‘Minibar’ activities, that imprint lasting changes on the physical, urban texture.” Minibar has itself been exhibited in different formats, including installations with text interventions, theoretical documents and slide shows. For Over and Above Altay has created a new compilation of slides that are here projected as stills within the moving images of the rest of the programme. These paused images show the ‘Minibar’ act, details such as the use of plastic drinking bottles, the evenings’ ephemeral remains and then finally the permanent interventions that intercept the ‘Minibar’ and cause it to move on.
“I mean, people created this place’’.
Excerpt from the minibar interviews by Can and Deniz Altay
In Paperman, another new edit from a larger installation, Altay forms a diary about the garbage collection of non-official rubbish collectors in Ankara. These men collect specific ‘types’ of garbage in order to sell it on for recycling. The camera follows these ‘Papermen’, who during the day and throughout the night, spend hours going through the city’s bins and refuse, searching out countless samples of a specific material in order to make a living. The authorities turn a blind eye to this practice, which in fact appears to benefit everyone, from the official garbage collectors, to those that recycle the materials and finally those that are making the best out of what is available, the ‘Papermen’.
With a similar attitude ‘of making the most of the situation’, Osman Bozkurt’s DVD Auto Park depicts families picnicking and playing on the verges of some of Istanbul’s major roads and motorways. Not to be inconvenienced by a lack of green space near their homes, these families plan entire day trips to be spent within metres of speeding traffic. As one would expect, these areas are not officially open to the public, but no one seems to notice or care. As Bozkurt interviews different people who sit out on the minimal grassy banks, it is clear that they more than enjoy these small islands of green land for the space and freedom that they provide. One interviewee suggests that the spaces are ‘well designed and if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a road to be crossed – convenient’. Another picnicker, when asked about the disturbing noise coming from the traffic optimistically philosophizes that: “There is no noise. Of course if you give yourself to the noise, there is noise.”
Specifically produced for the programme is Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr extracted excerpts from their documentary work Tehran 1380. The new edited version includes footage of contemporary Tehran and interviews that describe how quickly the city is changing and expanding. The Alborz mountains provide a natural background and limit for the city and so it is within the existing urban configuration that a chaotic and tangled growth of newly built living spaces can be witnessed. Air space is where the planned developments are to formally occur, but there are also makeshift sites such as the interior of billboard signs that are accommodating the excess population. Since the revolution of 1979 the population has dramatically exploded and now a third of the city is less than 14 years of age. It is in this work and other documentaries both made and in progress that Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr are proposing that it is no longer the Capitols of the West, but the highly populated and organically growing conurbations such as Tehran that are now setting the standards for today’s cities.
The Atlas Group is a fictional art collective formed by Walid Raad. In the work I think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep another fictive construction is taking place. The work is filmed on the Corniche, Beirut’s seaside walkway, a place that is renowned these days as a pleasant place to walk, talk and jog. It is also known as the favourite meeting place of political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune-tellers and phrenologues. To keep an eye on all these activities, Lebanese security agents set up cameras in 1992 along the strip. The cameras were manned and were placed inside the mini-van cafes that lined the strip at 18 metre intervals.
Instead of concentrating on capturing on camera these deviant activities, the operator of camera #17 would divert his camera’s focus away from its designated target and instead aim its view to the setting sun. For shifting his attention to something far more personally appealing, the operator was dismissed in 1996,
According to the Atlas Group, although they never had contact with the camera operator, he sent them the sunset video footage he had been permitted to keep. The cameraman also stated that he had focused his camera on the sun when he thought it was about to set and that he returned to his duties once he thought the sun had set. Moreover, he stated that having grown up in East Beirut during the war years, he always yearned to watch the sunset from Corniche located in West Beirut.
Finally, to offer another perspective on the social production of space and the utilization of a physical environment pushed to its limits, architects Neutral were approached to produce an urban impression of their recent visit to Cairo. Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman have been working together since 1998, when they collaborated in Tokyo to produce the film seek.01. In a similar way to seek.01 their new work Clustered In performs as a fast-moving diary and personal reading of the city. Clustered In was filmed in May 2004, using a digital still camera with a highly compressed Mpeg movie option. The film ‘refers to the gregarious atmosphere of people huddling densely within their groups and families under the threat of the ever intruding sand from the surrounding desert’. Interpreting the speed of the city is foremost and although its inhabitants remain as Neutral suggests: ‘clustered in’, the film continuously proposes the desire for escape. Each section of the video concentrates on a mode of transportation, or another implied shift from a to b, such as the speed of change that results from increased allusion to commodity value. Together these different forms of exchange span years of history, while also proposing a desire for the new and the possibility to move further and more quickly in time and space. The closing scene of Clustered In is filmed from a car, at night, – suggesting that ultimately this city, much like the others refered to in this programme, will continue such rapid acceleration even when left alone.
Works and order
The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Lebanon
I think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep, 2000, DVD, 6:30
Can Altay, Turkey
Minibar, 2004, DVD, 3:30
Osman Bozkurt, Turkey
Auto-Park The Highway Parks of Istanbul, 2003 DVD 15:00
Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr, Iran
Excerpts from Tehran 1380, mini DV, 18:30
Can Altay, Turkey
Papermen, DVD, 9:56
Neutral - Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman, UK
Clustered In, 2004, DVD NTSC, 9:00
Tuesday, 9 November 2004
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