In the early weeks of the SAHA Studio program, as I began photographing the transformations of the landscape on the periphery of Istanbul, I was somewhat aware that the route I was following would eventually lead to a semi-fictional narrative. While I expected to encounter a strange terrain where ongoing constructions intertwined with long-abandoned ruins, I hadn’t anticipated the oppressive, congested atmosphere of the city to have infiltrated every layer of the landscape so thoroughly.
Throughout the residency, I was repeatedly confronted with the feeling that the meaning of the project I was carrying out under the shadow of both social and environmental disasters was gradually fading. This sense deepened further with the weight of the current agenda and the tremors that might signal the long-anticipated major Istanbul earthquake. The landscape I encountered—marked by canal routes traced on maps, sudden rises of concrete pillars, quarries, caves, aqueducts, and dams predicted to vanish—preserved a memory as deep as the one embedded in the city, while also pointing toward the uncertain possibilities of a future obscured by construction dust.
Words I heard during a studio visit prompted me to reflect on photography’s limitations in conveying meaning and its dependency on text. That’s how short notes and fictional fragments—elements I had never included in my practice before—began to slip into my work, shaped by my weekly journeys through the city’s edges, observing from a distance landscape I could rarely approach.
As I approach the final stages of Dust, Root, Concrete a project that takes as its premise the idea that reality can be just as misleading as fiction, a photographic series and an accompanying photo book have come together. Echoing the distance between the moment a photograph is taken and the landscape it depicts, these two bodies of work bring to SAHA Studio a space I experienced at the periphery—an ambiguous, hard-to-define expanse.
Limited Edition Book
