Fatal Manhattan

2018-2019Installation, multiple video and sound installation,

We need 4 metrics to determine a location: latitude, longitude, ground clearance and time. (3 of these are located in space, the 4th one is the location in time.) In this context, the linear time is ignored in the project and Fatal Manhattan 40.7'29.7 '', is an imaginary coordinate dening the location of a small town named Degirmendere (Millcreek), located on the opposite side of Turkey's one of the largest oil refinery owned by Tüpras. This is also one of the places where most of the lung cancer cases are seen in Turkey. But when the night comes and oil refinery’s lights are on, townsfolk come to the seaside and start to drink. This is a kind of ritual for them as they think that the oil refinery creates a “Manhattan” skyline. They do not care about health or pollution issues, they are just gathering each evening along the seaside, enjoying the melancholy and the beauty of the view.

This ironic and even sarcastic situation led me to this project. My starting point has been the name of the town (Milkcreek) and the irony resulting from people’s reflex. So I created a ‘Don Quixotean’ anti-hero.

The cumulative impact of humankind on the planet continues to increase. How can we act against it in the Capitalocene era?
How to prevent going under the wrecking ball due to the Human/Capital-induced geological evolution that causes irreversible physical changes, population growth? How to reduce the increase in energy demand and waste? How to resist conducting wars with drones and launching new wars with them, non-preventable consumption and consuming societies?
Are we waiting for destruction? Are we waiting for nature and creatures to disappear? Are we watching/tolerating the accelerationism? Is an autopoiesis society a solution?
McKenzie Wark wrote that Marx’s “All that is solid melts into air.” sentence suggests something different. It reflects the image of the industrial era, of steam power, smokestacks and it is a metaphor of a changing society; it illustrates the disappearance of a community spreading in the air such as atoms.

In the video –placed inside the dust bag, we are watching an archive worker who accidentally switches from a different dimension to Degirmendere collecting data and trying to deal with the refinery’s smoke coming out of the sky.
Maybe she is dealing with the mills...

The dust bag is making up space itself, and we can see the data that the archival officer’s records of what they took into the archive vacuum tool. These include technological waste, archival images and a drone. In the videos placed outside the dust bag space, we see the refinery / mill / black utopian itself. The birds are recorded in the video without totally disappearing, we hear them but they are erased from both the video and the world due to time-out, oxygen exposure as well as magnetic interference.
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Another instrument of the project is a lecture-performance of the archive worker consisting of her notes which comprises a contextual ground of misunderstanding.