SEMA BOYANCI

8 INTERIOR SPACE 4: The driver’s seating area on a jitney… Placed above the driver’s head, charms suspended on an array of ribbons, some braided and some coiled… After the black and white photographs immediately adjacent to them, subsequently color-enlivened images of Yeşilçam actresses and actors: Türkan Şoray, Filiz Akın, Suzan Avcı, Sevda Ferdağ, Ayhan Işık, Necdet Tosun, Ahmet Tarık Tekçe, Hüseyin Baradan and others… Political, social, cultural, artistic, imaginary, symbolic codes…objects…motifs… ornaments… distilled from the old, familiar slums of Turkey; having found a place in the future of the new Turkey, in fact, maintaining their decisive role in our social lives even today… Culturally typical images and forms, both tense and compulsory, familiar and unfamiliar, simple although exaggerated in their new lifestyle, baring within them a humaneness which is deep, albeit primitive from time to time, of that which is raw, ambitious, dreamy and hasty, displaced into their city lives, from all of those settlements, ghettos or neighborhoods. These utterly familiar, both old and internal, and at the same time novel humane social cultures continue to take shape through transforming their existence by evolving anew… Most of them will arrive through migration from Anatolia to the perimeters of large, central megacities due to unemployment or dreams of a better life, where they will build dwellings made of excess construction materials in every way, shape or form they can imagine, to the extent that their resources will permit, whether makeshift, or the tiniest of single room, box-like accommodations in the outskirts, and will experience a brand new synthesis between the republican culture which established an urbanization and a modern civilizationwith the founding of the Republic; and the roadless, unplanned, public space encroachments lacking electricity and infrastructure, subverted by non- urbanized, persistently nomadic and therefore non-individualistic inhabitants in would-be settlements. Jitneys run buzzing from the early morning through the wee hours of the night each day, from the centers of these overcrowded and cramped megacities to the settlements on their perimeters. This “Jitney-culture” as referred to in socio- cultural jargon, has been a matter of lengthy debate in recent history, and the “arabesque” concept shall continue to proliferate and transform as though an “amoeba” with its previous formand contents as a result of thesemutual cultural exchanges. Although these areas on the outskirts of cities where skyscrapers are excessively erected are subject to improvement by way of the hand of government imposed “urban transformation” projects, thereby creating new areas of cultural, political and social conflict, in essence, the situation will proceed in the very same way. Washed laundry, panties, undershirts, bras, socks, coats, rugs and other items spread across clotheslines suspended between two stone apartment buildings on either side of the street in Beyoğlu’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood in the heart of Istanbul… the “wedding festivities” taking place on the streets, circumcision halls, maps, photographs, cultural and vital images and objects relating to Kahta, Arguvan, Develi, Eğin, Şırnak and other places, neighborhoods and villages from