“Scattered Stories; Hummanitarian Corridor”

Humanitarian Corridors are often set up in war or conflict zones to provide relief or evacuation for civilians, but they are sometimes misused to make war more destructive.

In this work, a humanitarian corridor is constructed using shoes and shoelaces found among the ruins of Diyarbakır/Sur, a Kurdish city destroyed in a recent war, as well as among the remains of Syrian refugees washed ashore on the Aegean coast of Turkey.

Scattered Stories; Humanitarian Corridor compels us to rethink the process of dissolution—previously articulated through the body and space—this time through movement itself. If, in the first phase, the body was reduced to a trace, and in the second, space was emptied of its interiority, here the conditions of moving through this double loss come into question. The issue is no longer representation nor absence as such; rather, it is how movement becomes possible—or impossible—within a field structured by absence.

The notion of a “humanitarian corridor” is commonly framed within international discourse as a promise of safe passage, evacuation, and protection. This installation, however, does not take that promise at face value. Instead, it exposes its political fragility and susceptibility to instrumentalization. Historically and in contemporary contexts alike, humanitarian corridors have functioned not only as mechanisms of protection, but also as dispositifs that regulate, constrain, and at times redistribute violence across space. The work translates precisely this contradiction into a spatial and embodied experience.

Constructed from shoelaces, the corridor does not offer a clear, directional path. Rather than guiding movement, it produces a transitional regime in which direction itself is continually suspended. The relationship between departure and arrival is destabilized; the sense of progression is constantly threatened by interruption. Passage thus ceases to function as resolution or escape, and instead emerges as a condition of perpetual deferral.

Within this phase, the shoelace assumes yet another role, extending beyond its previous functions: it becomes a linear network that both organizes and sabotages movement. Held under tension, these lines appear to generate orientation, yet their constant potential to snap keeps that orientation in suspension. The moving body can never fully advance; each step is accompanied by the latent possibility of pause, rupture, or collapse.

As the viewer enters the structure, the work moves entirely beyond representation and becomes a direct bodily experience. Yet this is not participation in the conventional sense of interactive art. The viewer is not an autonomous agent moving freely, but a body compelled to negotiate its trajectory within a preconfigured regime of passage. What unfolds is not merely a spatial challenge, but the embodied enactment of politically regulated mobility.

The labyrinthine configuration of the corridor intensifies this condition. Here, the labyrinth is not a puzzle to be solved, but a situation in which resolution itself is indefinitely deferred. As the viewer searches for an exit, they encounter not simply disorientation, but the dissolution of direction as such. This circulation does not merely produce the experience of being lost; it reveals how orientation itself is constructed and controlled. The work does not liberate movement—it renders visible the conditions under which movement is permitted, structured, and constrained.

At certain points within the installation, solitary shoes appear as nodal markers within this system. These objects function as material residues of interrupted passages and incomplete trajectories. Yet they do not complete a narrative; on the contrary, they intensify its absence. The viewer does not witness a singular tragedy, but moves within a structure in which tragedy has become continuous.

The spatial language of the work sustains this condition through a controlled, almost neutral austerity. The thinness and permeability of the shoelaces reinforce the structure’s oscillation between presence and absence. Boundaries remain indistinct; distinctions between inside and outside, beginning and end, dissolve. The corridor no longer serves as a passage from one place to another—it becomes a threshold where the very idea of passage is suspended.

Ultimately, this third phase completes the process of dissolution that structures the series as a whole: the body has been reduced to a trace, space has been emptied into void, and movement itself has been destabilized. Scattered Stories; Humanitarian Corridor occupies the point at which these three operations converge most intensely, displacing the viewer from the position of observer and forcing them into the fragile architecture of this condition.