Installation
2025
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This installation, beyond the functions it transfers into the space, reminds us that the ground is a material, trace-bearing surface. The negative mold taken from the piled pavement stones—stones we might encounter on any street in Istanbul, waiting to be replaced with new ones—creates a kind of surface memory by capturing the texture of the ground, its fractures, and the marks left by the stone embedded in it. Through the stones’ refusal to detach from the mold and their adhesion to its surface, the installation contains not only the form but the space itself in a direct and literal way. The stones are no longer merely components of a place. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “trace” (Spur), the pavement stones become concrete witnesses of a time and a space.

This condition emphasizes that belonging is not only a mental construct but also a material burden.

In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the concepts he attributes to floors, walls, and every corner of the house extend here into the street, even into the street’s underlying structural elements. In doing so, the installation brings to the surface—and turns upside down—the quiet testimonies embedded in the urban ground, the overlooked details within the everyday.