“Whether large or small, a city is something very different than the sum of its houses, streets and monuments, and in the same vein it isn’t just a center of economy, trade and industry either. City, as the spatial projection of social relations, reveals itself as a place where the web of borderlines separating the mundane from the holy, the work from the entertainment, the men from the women, the family from what is stranger to it intersect in itself, and also form its construction at the same time. And with this quality, it provides us a perfect decryption key.” - Maurice Aymard
In opposite of urban transformation of Sulukule where it’s dwellers were clustered under a common identity, transformation of another district of Istanbul’s Historical Peninsula on Haliç (Golden Horn); Fener Balat Ayvansaray goes silently, without attracting the same public attention. Starting out from the transformation process, in this new work of Sehir ve Bellek (The City and The Memory) of artizinconnu, I’ve tried to explore the meaning of the word “texture” that has been heard frequently in relation to urbanism.
Inspired by works of Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre and Sergei M. Eisenstein, in this documentary, I’ve attempted to push the viewer to “see” further than what is “visual” by “looking” and “hearing” the urban spaces under the light of it’s collective and individual use. The camera opens from across the Haliç (Golden Horn) in Beyoğlu (Pera) and while carrying the viewer gradually into the district focuses on social characteristics of fragmented spaces. Passing through the roads that connect to the city, the district’s market, residential area that has been reached is explored from the view point of a woman who immigrated from Karadeniz (Black Sea) to Istanbul in the fifties.
