Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cayli, Eray 2015 "Resisting Verticality, Occupying Teleology" in E. Ş. Akalın, A. Bunk, G. F. Harsch and E. Pick, Eds. Layering DiverCity (Floating Volumes #4), Hamburg: Textem, Pp. 111-118.
Cayli, Eray 2015 "Resisting Verticality, Occupying Teleology" in E. Ş. Akalın, A. Bunk, G. F. Harsch and E. Pick, Eds. Layering DiverCity (Floating Volumes #4), Hamburg: Textem, Pp. 111-118.
RESISTING VERTICALITY,
OCCUPYING TELEOLOGY:
The protests of
Summer 2013
in GEZI PARK and
TAKSIM SQUARE
By Eray ayl
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The particular barricade shown in Figure 1 was in many ways the conflation of these various simultaneous but geographically dispersed moments of protest. It is located a hundred meters from Taksim Square,
but named after Abdullah Cmert, the activist who lost his life in the
southern city of Antakya due to being shot in the head with a gas canister.1 The barricade is also a temporal conflation as it brings together
different moments across the chronology of the protests. The construction iron and the steel panels, of which the barricade is made, come
from the project that was then still under construction in Taksim. Officially called the Taksim Square Pedestrianization Project, this is one
of the numerous urban and architectural projects pursued by the ruling
party AKP (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi; in English: Justice and Development
Party) who have been governing Turkey for more than a decade now.
The AKPs political discourse is primarily built on the idea of progress, or in economic terms, development, which is also found in the
partys name. Much of this development has been driven by the construction sector and therefore large-scale projects such as the one concerning Taksim have been given a crucial role. The governing authorities have had a very close involvement in and often direct control over
such projects.2 This has led to the state institution TOK transform into
the countrys leading actor in construction, which was founded in the
1980s as the states housing agency but has now begun to build a wide
range of projects stretching from stadia, universities and culture centers
to monuments, military buildings and transport hubs.3 Actions speak
louder than words (Lafa deil icraata bakarm), a mantra that has been
popularized by many members of the ruling party, very well summarizes the political importance that the government give to large-scale
architectural and infrastructural projects across Turkeys cities.4 The
AKP propaganda poster seen in Figure 3 reads: If I were stranded
alone on an island, the three things Id take with me would be Recep
Tayyip Erdoan [the AKPs leader and Prime Minister]; because he
would build roads, hospitals, airports, and a subway system. Erdoan
himself has suggested over and again that they are the most hardworking government Turkey has seen, and has blamed all other sociopolitical actors past and present for lack of ambition, clear aim, purpose, and
progressive direction.5
I will return below to this emphasis on the idea of progress. But let
me first turn from rhetoric to architectural space, and look at what sort
of spatial negotiations and relations have been revolving around these
state-sponsored architectural projects. Figure 4 presents four stills from
the 2012 video introducing the Taksim Pedestrianization Project.
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Hurriyet Daily News, Turkeys Council of State cancels Taksim pedestrianization project, 06.05.2014,
www.hurriyetdailynews.
com/turkeys-council-of-state-cancels-taksim-pedestrianization-project.aspx?pageID=238&nID=66095&NewsCatID=340
We had a fuller grasp of how the project looked only when we toppled
the barriers surrounding the construction site: gigantic tunnels and a
sea of concrete that stretches as far as the eye can see. We understood
that if and when the project is complete, the square would become
a strictly monitored and protected area that weighs down on people
rather than a place of public meeting.9
Therefore, the activists barricades served not only to protect the
square, but before that, to unveil it. While the unveiling concerned
what had gone on in the recent past with respect to the pedestrianization project, the protection had to do with the possibility of attack
in the near future. Most importantly, it exposed the spatial crisis that
the concept of public has over the past few decades been undergoing.
The crisis, as the activist puts it, is between the fact that public space
is increasingly becoming a strictly monitored and protected space
and the idea that it ought to be a place of public meeting. What is
more, this crisis has been recently highlighted in Turkey due not only
to the redesigning of Taksim Square, but also to the construction of an
altogether new, seven-hundred-thousand-squaremeter urban space in
Istanbul: the Yenikap Square (Figure 11).
The newness of Yenikap Square is not just a matter of redesign. It
has been created quite literally from scratch as landfill reclaimed from
the sea. At a capacity of one and a quarter million people, it has officially been designated as the Rally Grounds of Metropolitan Istanbul,
which means that any initiative to hold a demonstration in Istanbul
is now obliged to use this space in Yenikap. And, arguably, the main
reason why Yenikap Square has been built and designated as the official rally grounds has very much to do with its counterpart in Taksim.
Taksim Square has been the main venue of political demonstrations
over the past few decades due not only to its centrality and visibility but
also to its historical specificity. On May 1st, 1977, Taksim witnessed a
bloody massacre targeting thousands of activists celebrating the International Workers Day in what was then the largest demonstration in
Turkeys history. Unidentified assailants opened fire on the crowd from
the rooftops of the buildings surrounding the square, leaving more
than forty people dead.10 The day has been visually engraved in memory through an iconic image showing the Ataturk Culture Center, a
1970s opera and theater building and the most important architectural
landmark in the square, covered with a huge red banner that portrays
a blue-collar worker and reads May 1st (Figure 12). Since 1977 the
authorities have closed Taksim Square to May Day demonstrations,
with the only exception of the year 2010 when the government were
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from the night of May 31st when the activists occupying Gezi Park and
Taksim Square began to build the first barricades. They formed a brigade
to pass materials from hand to hand, and took shifts to keep guard. As
the police force retreated from the area, activists started to name the
barricades after the victims of police crackdown, use them as photographic background, hold drum circle sessions, and even organize a barricade design workshop that focused on function, structure, size, materials, color, and implementation (Figure 9). Up to the moment when
the police finally entered Gezi Park on the 15th of June to evacuate the
area, the barricades had therefore not only served the ordinary function
of demarcation and zone defense. They had also functioned as monuments where activists memorialized their shared pasts, as social hubs
where people hung out and met, as political platforms where protestors
reflected on their experiences and discussed what the future may hold.
Therefore, if in structures such as the steel castle multi-functionality is a design feature, in the activists barricades it was a somewhat intuitive way of using architectural space, which evolved gradually and
thanks to the participation of hundreds.
But the purposes that these structures afforded did not only concern
the barricade-as-object and involved the-barricade-as-process, and this
is what constitutes their historical specificity and requires a revisit to the
materials used in their production. Earlier I talked about how most of
these materials came from the construction site that Taksim Square had
become due to the so-called pedestrianization project. Now, it is important to remember that much of the square had for nearly a year been
fenced off and closed to public due to being under construction (Figure
10). Arguably, the barriers that then enclosed the site and concealed the
project concerned not only safety and security but also secrecy. Hardly
anybody knew what was exactly being built in the square and how the
pedestrianized area would actually look when completed, because the
wider public had not at all been informed about the definitive details
of the project or how it was proceeding. The contested legality of the
projectits progression often in spite of adverse court decisions8
meant that the authorities had to tweak certain aspects as construction progressed, and little was publicly revealed about such gradual
changes, too. What the pedestrianization project actually looked and
felt like was revealed only when scores of activists flocked into Taksim
Square and Gezi Park on May 31st to support those who had been standing their ground for the past few days, and when they removed the
barriers hiding the construction from sight. In the words of an activist
who was then at the spot:
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DEEP
SEA
FISH
Von Silvina Der-Merguerditchian
Die Straen von Cihangir sind nicht sehr freundlich zu Fugngern, sie sind voller Steine, Schlaglcher, Hindernisse. Normalerweise geht man auf der Strae. Manchmal fahren die Autos
bedrohlich dicht an einem vorbei und drngen einen zurck auf
den Fuweg, aber im Allgemeinen ist es praktischer, auf der Strae
zu gehen. Die Autos wissen das und tolerieren dich. Manche
rufen dir sanft, andere etwas brutaler ihre Prsenz in Erinnerung. In Cihangir spazieren zu gehen bedeutet ein intensives
Hin-und-Herswitchen zwischen Strae und Brgersteig, ein Abschtzen, wie viele Schritte du auf dem Gehweg machen kannst,
bis du wieder auf der Strae landest, bis wieder die ersten Autos
vorbeikommen und dich daran erinnern, dass du auf ihrem Territorium unterwegs bist, und dich auf den Gehweg zurcktreiben.
Als ich vor fnf Jahren zum ersten Mal durch Istanbul ging, war ich voller Angst. Angesichts der Dichotomie Ich/Trkei war ich es gewohnt,
Angst zu empfinden. Die Menschen machten mir Angst, die Autos
machten mir Angst, die Brgersteige machten mir Angst, die Fenster
machten mir Angst
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Silvina Der-Meguerditchian,
geboren in Buenos Aires,
Argentinien, 1967.
Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.
Der-Meguerditchian ist die
Initiatorin der Knstlerplattform www.underconstruction
home.net. Im Jahr 2014 hat
sie 6 Monate in der Knstlerakademie Tarabya/Istanbul als
Stipendiatin verbracht. Im Jahr
2015 wird sie im Armenischen
Pavilion whrend der Venedig
Biennale reprsentiert und
in Istanbul die Ausstellung
Enkel in DEPO parallel zur
Istanbul Biennale kuratieren.
Seit 2010 ist sie Art-director
der Seite www.houshamadyan.
org, ein Projekt, das sich zur
Aufgabe gemacht hat, das Alltagsleben der osmanischen
Armenier zu rekonstruieren.