I am not walking the same way as you.
Installation, Manifesto
13×18CM, 36 Frames of Sentences Written with a Typewriter
2011
'I am not walking the same way as you.' is a conceptual installation of 36 wooden panels, each containing a typewritten sentence. Commissioned for the group exhibition No More Luggage, which took place at Istanbul's Tophane-i Amire Cistern Galleries between October 13th and 28th, 2011, the work collects phrases overheard from strangers in various public spaces throughout the city. These moments of speech, decontextualized and anonymized, cohere as a mass but disjunct narrative, between disclosure and anonymity. The sentences appear in grid fashion, as though artifacts of momentary urban speech—voices briefly moored to a stationary medium before breaking away into the city's ever-fluxing tide.
The inflexible structure of the installation is the opposite of the fluidity of the raw material. Typewritten words, in their mechanical homogeneity, create tension between impersonal record and the intimacy of personal speech. This doubleness has echoes in the paradox of urban life, wherein crowded space at once enables contact and isolation. In fragmenting phrases from their original context, the work fragments collective narrative into individual statements, highlighting the dissonance and diversity of experience within shared public space.
The self-aware title highlights this divergence by setting walking as a metaphor for the range of paths and perspectives that exist within shared space. The conceptual of dropping "luggage" in the show reflects the eschewal of linear narrative in favor of ephemeral, open-ended moments of human expression.
The intimate physical proximity between the frames suggests indiscriminate connections, a replication of the indiscriminate encounters characteristic of urban life. Dwelling on transience and anonymity, the installation questions how cities pre condition communication, dispersing rich human experience into fleeting marks. It is a silent witness to the city's contradiction of collective life—voices amplified by proximity but suffocated by the ceaseless movement of the city.
