Close to the View, In the Distance
May 2022 - April 2023
DÜZCE
The project followed the traces of urbanization in the changing panoramas from the town of Konuralp in Düzce with an artistic visualization. Declared as a city by President Süleyman Demirel in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake, Düzce was subjected to fast and poorly planned development. Therefore, the project used Henri Lefebvre's concept of right to the city as its theoretical foundation, while a series of landscape paintings from the 1990s TV show "The Joy of Painting" by Bob Ross, images, data, and documents collected from local residents formed its visual component.
In "The Joy of Painting," Bob Ross used to describe in detail landscapes from Alaska, where he lived for years, so his viewers could also paint them. These paintings would mostly depict trees, creeks, lakes, mountains and the sky - landscapes with minimal human intervention. They would carry traces of a peaceful realm, a safe space, untouched by the human hand. What would be the equivalent of such an iconic landscape image today? What kind of threat are the cities we live in under, how have they transformed and what remains in our memory? The project seeked to answer such questions through Düzce panoramas.
As a resident of Konuralp in Düzce for a long time, the artist has been a witness to the major transformation this city has been going through. Previously known for its rivers, lakes, waterfalls and forests, Düzce today is at the top of the list of poorly planned, most industrialized and air-polluted cities in Turkey. Its residents will tirelessly repeat that what used to be vast forests and greenest meadows not too long ago have been replaced with concrete buildings. At this point, as we contemplate our rights to the city, this project offered to look at the matter through not just the perspective of humans but also non-human creatures, to rethink Düzce’s natural landscapes in the aftermath of overurbanization and to carry the utopia one step forward.
