Journal

By Yusuf Sevinçli

In early autumn 2022, I decided to embark on a road trip to the fringes of Istanbul, as a response to the SAHA commission on climate change. The term ‘road trip’ usually implies travelling to an unknown destination for a substantial amount of time. In my case, it was reformulated into an express three-day personal exploration of my own city. The following is my journal regarding some of the encounters and events that took place between 15 September and 17 September 2022 in the metropolitan districts of Sultangazi, Cebeci, Paşaköy, Kemerburgaz and Karaburun: a report on the investigation of a presumed familiar but in fact totally alien topography. – Yusuf Sevinçli

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What at first glance seemed a small-scale exploration of the urban periphery transcended, in a compressed period of time, the experience of the ‘city’ I frequent. An entirely different world exists twenty minutes’ drive away from Taksim Square. Various of the places I photographed – anonymous to most of Istanbul’s indifferent residents – arose before my eyes as an inhospitable and uncanny no man’s land. This abrupt transition from the places I knew to locations I had presumably read about or heard of in the news (but with which I was unfamiliar in essence), led me to confront in awe the scale of my city – how brutally vast, inhumane, and insanely out of control Istanbul is right now.

Half an hour north from Taksim lies Başakşehir. The area connecting the new airport with the highway which destroyed the last remaining untouched forest zone of the peninsula is now a jungle of concrete, asphalt and skyscrapers. It corresponds to a scale beyond human imagination.

Experiencing it at first hand was different from knowing. Experiencing was also distinct from knowing in the case of the old marble quarry fields which are situated in Cebeci, again a half hour’s drive from the city centre. Located at the heart of a historical landscape, the quarries dig deep into the earth, a fathomless bullet hole. Ten minutes into the drive, and you find yourself at the Mağlova Aqueduct, a heritage site of international significance, which brought water from Belgrad Forest and Kemerburgaz to the city centre. Confronting these different layers of the city next to each other is overwhelming.

I met very few people during my wanderings. One of them was a sixty-year-old man, who was walking around in the middle of nowhere near the marble quarries in Cebeci. According to his own words, he had taken a stroll from where he lives out of boredom and to get some fresh air. His drift amid a landscape devastated by unregulated industrialisation, where there is nothing to see and to enjoy, is the manifestation of an absurd anti-natural cohabitation.

On the third day of my road trip, I found myself in Karaburun by the Black Sea, close to the New Istanbul Airport. From the crowded beach we could see the aeroplanes approach us. We drove for five minutes into the hills, and found ourselves at the tip of the airport runway. In the surrounding area were shepherds with their sheep and people gardening by their humble dwellings, and around them a contaminated wasteland of inexistent vegetation. Planes were flying only a few metres on top of us; you could feel the ground shaking and even the shepherds’ dogs became panicked because of the buzzing sound of the engines. The proximity of the packed beach, the shepherds and the community gardens to the huge airport produces a striking contrast. One of the most ambitious, largest and award-winning airports in the world, and when you turn your back, a different reality to confront: an environmental disaster.

With the courtesy of the artist. Commissioned within the scope of SAHA Studio program and produced with the support of SAHA.

SAHA Art Writing Series

Supported by the SAHA Art Initiatives Sustainability Fund 2021-22, m-est.org will publish a series of texts focusing on the weather reporting of the respective locations where the invited artists and writers are based, in the scope of the World Weather Network. The series intends to address the artistic strategies to measure, report, fabulate, and tell stories about the weather, air flows, circulation, and other high to low pressure aspects of our practices and cities. The texts will be accompanied by talks and lectures between spring 2022 and spring 2023.

Part of the weather station: Istanbul, Turkey - find out more here.