Lütfen Arkaya Doğru İlerleyiniz II
Please Move Towards The Back  volume II
galeri x-ist

“When the municipal police force tore my house down that I had just started to build, the neighborhood dwellers came up by my side. I was 15 years old. I had come to Ankara by myself. One lighted my cigarette, one offered a chair, yet another brought some water. I was crying.They said “don’t be sorry, we will build a better one.” Indeed, we did.We undertook the construction altogether. We built it in only one night. There were ones who brought construction materials and others who cooked. Nobody asked ‘who are you?’, or ‘where are you from?’ They knew that I was just like them. They had walked down the same road before. I learnt where they were from and what they were doing only after we were done with the construction and my mother came from the village and befriended our neighbors.” It is my father, Yasar Cavdar who is telling this story. Actually, he depicts a ritual. A ritual of acceptance of a 15 year old boy – a boy who leaves his village, moves to town, and waits tables in a coffee house in order to buy the construction material for the house that he is going to build  for his mother and siblings while starting middle school- to a community in which he does not have any acquaintance. In the blood of this ritual, runs the empathy that is built through the groomy anger of that boy whose house had been tore down by the municipal police force. Later on, in 1970s, the same boy worked in the numerous constructions in the district of Cukurambar, where upper-middle class of Ankara settled in today. Being the son of a stone mason from Bayburt, he had a voice in designing the shanties that they were building, but he was not the only one who made the decisions. “We were looking at the land and measuring where the light was coming from at a specific time of day, we were placing the windows by considering the houses around. The windows of the buildings that we built were opening in a way that was protecting the privacy of the neighboring buildings while letting the sunshine in. We were locating the living room and bedrooms where the building were facing the sun while the bathroom and restroom were being located on the other side. Also, the current location of the sewege and water pipes of the neighborhood were being checked or their future location was being considered.” Long story short, the design of the shanties were created by the community in question, and by this way, they were rendered anonymous.

In the night when the shanty is built, not donouncing it to the municipal police is the unseen piece of the ritual. On top of ignoring all the noise that a crowded group of workers make all night,  providing construction material if needed, and supporting the prospective neighbor by offering tea, water, or food, constitute the rest of the pieces. A family, who arrived the town just a day before, is getting acceptance to the neighborhood. The municipal police officer, who comes in the morning, checks whether the curtains are hanged, whether there are flowers in front of the window, whether the exteriors are whitewashed, and whether the heating stove is set or not and he writes down the phrase: “Here, the construction had been completed and the residency has just started.” If necessary, the bribery for the municipal officer is consolidated with the loan from the neighborhood dwellers.This is how the ritual gets completed. Here, there is no thing like “ask about your neigbors, then by the house”; both the house and the neighbor is produced by the community’s own initiative.

This is what differentiates a shanty from the houses which we choose by looking at ads or catalogs and buy on bank loans. Because, a shanty is built with a mutual attachment and empathy. The comfort of a shanty neighborhood is determined through the qualities of its construction ritual regardless of the material it is constructed with. My point is not delivering a eulogy for shanties. Because, starting from mid 1980s, I witnessed how especially the women of my neighborhood look forward to their husbands’ retirement which would enable them to get away from the shanty and move one of the apartment buildings of the district. And how they move into those apartments, which are bought with the money that is saved for an entire work life, with such a big pride. The effort they made to take every wedding, engagement,holiday, or funeral as an excuse to sit next to their fellows was a demonstration of what was missing in  apartment living. The apartments were unsatisfying and limiting for the kids as well.  

German art historian, Wilhelm Worringer researched what is effective in transition of a society from one sense of aesthetics to aother in his doctoral dissertation titled “Abstraction and Empathy” that he wrote as a young and excited student. He says, “the mainstream art and aesthetics in a society does not reflect what that society has, but what it does not have and what it aspires to have.”

Following that theme, we want “a place to live” and while enumerating the qualities of this place, we, in fact, make a list of things that we want but we do not have. Moreover, it is reasonable to conclude that every home is an utopia consisting of things that we do not own. The more a home is existant, adorned, and designed, the more complete is the list of the things that we do not own. From this perspective, a home is like a cliff between what we own and what we do not own.And, at the same time,  a home is the place where we have our best and worst states. Most importantly, a home is the place where we make a transition from good to bad, bad to good, light to dark, and dark to light. This is why a house is the lieu for morals. Every single thing in the house, which we enumerate considering we own them, actually refers to the things that we do not own but we aspire to. Not only with the things that are in it, but with all the things that are outside, around, or in the atmosphere of it, a home is a documentation of the things and states that we can discard, sacrifice, or waive for the opportunities and obstacles that life brings along. 

Thus, if we look at the place that we live in or we aspire to live in while keeping this in mind, the thing that we are going to see is a deep cliff that stands between our possessions and our admirations. And again, if we look at the transformation in the city centered around the houses, we see another cliff which we shaped together by frantically racing our desires and adding them together.

All this effort, which we make in order to turn into the person that we are not, makes the cliff deeper like a gigantic, cut glass construction machine. Maybe this is why we want to live in higher, more secure, more isolated, more distant, warmer, healthier, but at the same time, more central, more traditional, and more organic homes. And our self entity is shaped in the cliff that gets deeper with each  “more...”. Altogether, weAfetşehir Kolaj 8 create a life form with a minimum opportunity for socialization and in which comfort and and not-touching are synonyms, in a neighborhood,where we will never get acceptance, and for this reason, which we belittle digital collage and unliking every detail of it, to which we approach with a suspensefulcriticism. My your new home be blessed! Ayşe Çavdar 2012