Installation
2018
Metal Construction, Vinyl Print, Fluorescent Light
270×300×300CM
Çamdibi Institute for Standardization is an installation project touches on the ultra-fast urban transformation in the non-Western countries that has been in progress for the last two decades and the confusion that this transformation has on people. Since 2014, Burak Dikilitaş has been working in Çamdibi neighborhood as a laboratory for the discussion of dystopia and utopia. During his time there, the artist constantly observed the neighborhood within a network of photographs, texts, and experiences. ‘The Çamdibi Project Book’ he produced in 2015 is one of the products of this laboratory work.
In Mike Davis’s famous book ‘Planet of Slums’, the cities of the future are described as slum cities built from rough bricks, straw, recycled plastics and scrap, not glass and steel, similar to the vertical imagination of first-rate utopian urban planners. Early utopian city planners ideas can be described as a kind of dystopia - provided that the utopia is conceived as a form. In the midst of such a dual atmosphere, the neighborhoods of non-Western cities like Çamdibi or in the process of urban change bring the experience of being stuck between the utopia and the dystopia.
Installation aims to present the perspective perceived differently from the inside and outside. A photographic structure surrounded by natural obstacles such as sheet trapezes, walls, barriers and fences in the outer perimeter of an area of 9 square meters reestablishes the skyline, while the perspective distortions within the area define a structure that constantly moves away from the viewer and changes the position of the view. This structure reproduces the neighborhood's experience similar to a roller coaster. When the viewer is positioned and looked at from a certain point, starts to perceive a negative area on the opposite side that impossible to reach.
