UrbanRituals!

I reckon that the narrative to present the Istanbul project, has to be found looking at the content of the pictures taken to document it. The drawing made using chalk by people walking on the pavement.

Thinking of an identity of the area, the main aspect is this big hub for transports; the place has a huge bus station, taxis and piers going to the Asian side of the city. The city is connected to all the other areas from this point. And thinking of the frenetic rhythm of people moving into traffic and public spaces, without looking around, ignoring the routes they cover everyday (because part of the daily routine), made us wanting to try to stop them, interrupting their journey asking them to draw, to leave a sign on the pavement.

We started doing this out of the pier, where boats were coming from the other side and we had big groups of people coming every few minutes. The idea was to collect a series of their “impressions” on the pavement, whatever they wanted to draw, sketches and messages in a place where people don’t stop, but just walk pass quickly to the next destination.

Together with this, it was interesting to look at other people’s reactions to the drawings. Someone was carefully walking on the side, others stepped on, someone stopped to look at them.

Every drawing is a sketch, a frame of the “story” made up and left there by the people passing. Our aim was to pause people, slow them down for a minute, and breaking their routine asking for a mark in a public space.  Where other people could see it.

A way to “define a private space (people were drawing into circumscribed squares) into a public space”.

Everything happened in about 2 hrs. While time was passing, the “collection” of drawing grew.

Considering all this information I just wrote as a background, I thought that the narrative I need to represent for the project could be a flip book, where the all the drawing (just the drawing, not the pictures) one by one come to place in the page. Eevery time I turn a new page, one more drawing is reproduced. Starting with a blank spread (the clean pavement at the beginning of the day), every piece is going into place filling up page by page the all space.

In order to do that I need to trace all the drawing and to scan them, then I need to recreate the sequence…

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