“scattered stories; home” 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y0Mesl2R1o

This work consists of shoes and shoelaces. Shoes are collected from Diyarbakir a Kurdish city destroyed in a recent war, while others were found among the remnants of the refugees washed ashore on the Aegean coast of Turkey. The house and furniture, imagined by the artist, belong to the owner of the shoes whose stories are scattered or interrupted.

Scattered Stories; Home extends the void opened in the first phase—where the body is reduced to a trace—by relocating it directly onto the level of space itself. Here, the figure has fully withdrawn; yet this withdrawal does not operate as a lack, but as the very condition upon which the structure is constituted. The home ceases to be a lived place and instead emerges as an arrangement of emptiness made visible through the disappearance of lived experience. The work, therefore, does not represent architecture; it renders perceptible the threshold at which architecture loses its content, its function, and is held in suspension.

The interior traces encountered within the installation—kitchen, bedroom, living area—retain their recognizability while entirely losing their function. These elements no longer serve as sites of use, but produce only the effect of a boundary. The linear structure formed through the tension of shoelaces does not generate volume; rather, it organizes the absence of volume. Walls do not enclose but merely suggest; objects do not function but evoke the possibility of an order that once might have existed. In this sense, the home is no longer a shelter, but the negative plan of a withdrawn life.

At this stage, the shoelace assumes a new ontological role. Having functioned in the first phase as a trace of the body, it now becomes a line of tension that both constructs and simultaneously invalidates space. It does not bind but suspends; it does not stabilize but exposes discontinuity. In doing so, it directly suspends the foundational assumptions of the home—protection, continuity, belonging. The structure produced here offers no inhabitable interior; instead, it produces the impossibility of interiority itself.

The work thus compels a rethinking of the concept of “home” at both anthropological and sociological levels. A home is not merely a physical structure, but a lived form shaped by the accumulation of repetitive daily practices, embodied habits, and temporal continuities. Here, however, this continuity is severed. Fundamental acts such as cooking, resting, and being together can no longer take place; they persist only as memory. Space ceases to function as a ground that enables these actions and instead becomes a surface that carries their absence.

This transformation also destabilizes the notion of property. In modern terms, the home is understood as something that can be owned, protected, and secured within defined boundaries. In this installation, however, property is no longer a material guarantee but becomes the trace of an irreversible loss. The fragile lines formed by the shoelaces do not suggest permanence, but a structure perpetually on the verge of dissolution. The home, therefore, does not produce security; it renders precarity visible.

This radical thinning of space also reconfigures the position of the viewer. No longer an external observer, the viewer becomes a body that physically encounters this void. Yet this encounter is not an experience of entering an interior; it is a threshold in which the distinction between inside and outside collapses. The viewer does not find themselves within a room, but within the absence of one. This condition suspends not only spatial perception, but also the sense of belonging.

The force of the installation lies precisely in its capacity to sustain this state of suspension. Nothing is completed, yet nothing is entirely gone. Each line implies the possibility of a whole, but never actualizes it. This deferral removes the work from dramatic narration and situates it instead within a low-intensity but persistent field of tension. Loss here is not a singular event, but a condition that acquires continuity.

Ultimately, Scattered Stories; Home does not reconstruct the home; it fixes the point at which the very idea of home dissolves. This fixation is not a nostalgic recall, but an exposure of the impossibility of return. Space is no longer a site of habitation, but a surface from which lived experience has withdrawn. What remains is neither representation nor memory, but a fragile, discontinuous, yet persistent trace.

This second phase marks a critical threshold within the series: the void opened through the disappearance of the body here assumes a spatial form. Absence thus ceases to be a passive loss and becomes an actively constructed, experienced, and sustained condition.