Rantİstanbul Berlin

Surplus of Istanbul – March 19 at Neu West Berlin.

İstanbul has extended its borders and created new living spaces and suburbs by controlling the human cycle within the rules of neo-liberal capital over the years. The living spaces in Istanbul has been recreated in the name of “urban transformation”, and the city turns into a commercial meta which allows the citizens to live in the city only if they could survive between the wheels of this commercial cycle.

The projects “Rantİstanbul” and “Surplus of Istanbul” have recorded this transformation by intersecting lines and cooperating between 2010-15. “Rantİstanbul” kept the audiovisual records of the urban transformation and gentrification in Tarlabaşı by following the results of this gentrification against the people of Tarlabaşı and the reasons of this gentrification by asking what makes the buildings more valuable than the people who are using those buildings as a shelter. “Surplus of Istanbul” looks to the wastes of the city from the center of the city Beyoğlu to the periphery of Istanbul, Umraniye, by creating a personal map where the waste has been picked and re-used by the people, who are the usual victims of the urban transformation and gentrification.

Those two projects tell the stories and showing the records of “transformed/renewed” Istanbul, which lefts the objects and the people behind, and the utopia in the Gezi Park, which emerged the resistance against this transformation. We claim that urban transformation and gentrification are not unique concepts for Istanbul, and this transformation goes on also in Berlin by different axes. Therefore we plan to record and investigate the traces of Berlin, which left behind during the urban transformation and gentrification with workshops.

Watch the RantIstanbul Taksim Square video at StreetWalking, produced one month before the Gezi Park uprising in Istanbul.

WORKSHOP:
Where / How the city builds us?

Cities, as indispensable spaces of modern life, are gigantic structures which shelter the people as a space of existence. The city culture, which contains both the utopia and dystopia together, put the “adaptation to the city life” forward as a condition of “being human” by organizing even the smallest details of daily life of the people, who actually constitute the city. While the city on the one hand, like a living organism, transforms continuously, the people who are living in, define themselves as the witness/accused/victim of this transformation.
Today, living in one of the districts of the city becomes the condition of creating an identity in the city. “City culture” becomes the statements of the rules in the cultural space which the people in the city have to obey to live in the city.This workshop aims to record and compare these cultural codes, signs from the different parts of the city, the rules and the living spaces by starting from Istanbul example and discussing Berlin. The workshop plans to collect any audiovisual materials (photograph, video, found footage etc.) from the different parts of the city and produce a collective editing to understand the conditions which makes people urban or not and the signs and spaces where makes the people transform into an urban citizen.

March 19th: 19:00
Improvise Audio Visual Performance :
Devrim CK – Korhan Erel

Neu West Berlin is a multifaceted Contempprorary Art Space in Berlin Mitte. More than 80 artists are based with their studios within the 9 story building.