Ali Taptık, Fabrics, Composites and Abrasions (from Looking at Osmanbey Project), 2016, Lecture Performance

How can spatial transformation and production of urban area be posi- tioned within history? Where is the line between the personal and the social histories? These are some of the questions Taptik addresses as part of his doctoral research titled ‘Artistic Practice as Architectural Research’. Through a constant detailing of a timeline and a personal map, the researcher tries to understand the actors and the events that led to the transformation of an upper-middle class residential neighbourhood into a wholesale textile district. Şair Nigar Hanım’s escape from the police, revolutionary safe-houses, a stayover with his grandmother become part of larger narrative layered into this subjective timeline aiming to reveal a void for the wholesale textile industry to take over. The lecture performance relates synthetic materials, ubiquitous elements of contemporary textile and build- ing technologies with the interaction between global economy and the trans- formation of this urban area.