Aslıhan Güçlü & Mehmet Ali Kılıç
CLICHÉ CITY NARRATIVES
During a period when traveling became difficult due to the pandemic, we embarked on our project that focuses on urban clichés of İzmir and Şanlıurfa, cities known for their historical and cultural diversity. The project found its shape when we realized that we were focusing on well-known clichés while telling each other about the cities we could not visit in person. Our goal is to draw attention to the political, cultural, and physical transformation these two cities have gone through -despite the deliberate policy surrounding them to highlight their historical and cultural diversity-, and to question the role of tourism as an economic input in their transformation processes.
Transforming images and cultural icons into cliché items and basing all publicity around the city on these clichés establish the crux of our project. The first things that come to mind when we talk about İzmir are boyoz (a type of pastry of Sephardic Jewish origin), söğüş (a dish consisting of tongue, cheeks, and brain of sheep), Kordon, Asansör, archeological heritage and contemporary republican values. As for Şanlıurfa, these are çiğ köfte (raw meatballs), patlıcan kebabı (eggplant kebab), purple headscarves, Balıklıgöl, religious spaces and, more recently, Göbeklitepe. They pop up in our minds as a result of a consciously aestheticized mentality. Postmodernist cultural plurality trivializes the fundamental differences among socially, ethnically, and culturally diverse groups to transform global products or spaces of the cities into marketable brands, while the global transformation serves towards particular interests and aims of capitalism.
Basing the pivot of the project on these points, we relied heavily on popular touristic and symbolic spaces, such as Kemeraltı, Konak Meydanı, Kültürpark, Alsancak and Karataş in İzmir and Balıklıgöl, İpekyolu, Bağlarbaşı, Haşimiye Meydanı and Haleplibahçe in Şanlıurfa, where cultural transformation is more precipitously felt; then reproduced, and critiqued the sense of aesthetics that transform cultural icons, local dining habits, landmarks, souvenirs and tourist behaviors into clichés. k.
PROJECT TEAM: ASLIHAN GÜÇLÜ (İZMİR) & MEHMET ALİ KILIÇ (ŞANLIURFA)
