What I am dealing with is a state of the world: hollowed out to the core as a result of wars, earthquakes, migrations, and nuclear peril unleashed at every turn, threatening humankind while nature is being ceaselessly scathed and the environment sickened.
I attempt to physically and emotionally summon into existence this phenomenon: the emptiness, the hollowness, the brokenness produced by the devastations turned ordinary by the order of the day, whose pace becomes ever more impossible to keep up with, by the unimaginable griefs that keep striking, one after the next at relentless intervals, by empty values, identity struggles, and brittle human relationships.
On the other hand, I am drawn by the backdrop of this edifice, once a symbol of Venice’ military might over land and sea, by how it almost swathes the matter at hand, and, without a doubt, compelled to bring the two ancient cities, Venice and Istanbul, between which I kept pacing back and forth throughout the whole process, to congregate.
The columns – embodiments of the ‘force’ that, in the context of architecture, represents stability, prowess, durability and victory, the same force that, down the ages, has kept the world on guard by dint of wars and plunder – are replaced by hollow moulds, which can only stand in place with the help of propping devices.
Wheeled carts, gliding down rails without a beginning or end, are loaded up with broken glass shards.
Chandeliers, made of broken Venice glassware, alluding to the three monotheistic faiths which, throughout history, never renounced fighting one another, are only visible through a cloud full of pain.
The sound that emanates from the black-and-white images running on the screen is intent on dogging the spectator’s every footstep.
The light struggles to figure where to brighten.
The world, a battlefield, is an endlessly shifting ground…