Istanbul New Stories

At the opening of Fotografia Europea — the thematic international photography event promoted yearly by the Italian municipality of Reggio Emilia — Franco Farinelli introduced Paola De Pietri's photography project by stating the artist's work featured "a basic ambiguity that does not allow its complete vision, as if the photographs had a certain vagueness."

The encounter with the De Pietri allowed a better understanding of the design dynamics and operational strategies at play in the Istanbul new stories exhibition, bringing to light De Pietri's path and relationship with this contemporary city, which began by shooting in the 1990's with Dittici [1] or Via…, n… [2]. Here, fragments of everyday life carved out by careful observation become, in the author's photographic vision, visual archetypes of urban vitality, operational tools that can freeze evolving situations — from public spaces in the old city, to WWII sites, to metropolitan fringes, new conquered lands. The analysis and layering begins with the deep study of civic conditions, transcending the trite visual stereotypes that pigeonhole Istanbul as a city with marked relational qualities.

Istanbul exists in an understandable dichotomy between its historical context and frontier territories. The fringe belt becomes a place to affirm a life-style and cultural model that abandons — substantiated by real estate speculation — the traditional territory of inhabiting.

Paola De Pietri narrates the complex events that accompany a month-long exploration of construction sites run by big real estate developers, leading to the discovery of satellite cities scattered throughout the palimpsest of the built fabric of spontaneous neighborhoods. We pass from the historical model to the Gecekondu of illegal buildings temporally layered to redefine a built, fragmented and indefinite horizon. Toki, new public residential neighborhoods that go beyond the ineffective, but balanced, historic residential fabric, are built in the nebulous periphery, allured by the possible construction of a modern image that is the consequence of TV stereotypes — the spectacle society. These places and spaces do not escape privately-induced dynamics; they are gated communities, isolated objects in the urban fabric, made up of buildings and street systems, the result of an entrepreneurial dream of attracting new wealthy residents to a haven of artificial security and inevitable solitude.

The images explore an indistinct social dimension leading to, as the author tells us, a "suspended state of mind," the formulation of a landscape in which the population coexists with the impossibility of being able to appropriate it, surrounded by objects, unaware of a new "shift in the communitarian perspective" that will take years or generations to rebuild a social fabric — a new order of coexistence that does not need public space.

If "the important part of a photo is that part lying outside the frame, because the visible part is only a hint for being able to imagine the rest" [3], the photographs in the exhibition open a fantastic subtext of aspects related to inhabiting, relationships, use and the intermediate condition, with everyone becoming capable of projecting his/her own mental image on peripheral landscapes, strewn with animal presences rather than human ones. Places like that — interstitial spaces of an incoherent urban fabric — are seen through the eyes of the photographer as a new territory to conquer; the domain of abandoned dogs, bastards and mutts. "The distance between figures and external environment disappears" [4] for them.

People, however, portrayed as erratic objects in the uniform space of the urban fringe, declare an unconscious distance from the urban background, where relationships are difficult to perceive and imagine, defining an impracticable correspondence between actions and places. The photographic narrative introduces an illuminating perspective, discovering unusual urban and social dynamics in a country like Turkey — with strong traditions and cultural matrices, obsessed by economic and social progress that, in continental Europe, has already caused a disintegration of the urban civitas that is difficult to recover.

Buildings frozen halfway through construction, in their bare structure, reflect monotony and seriality that is inexplicable in the final configuration, returning a uniform catalogue of spaces that are alienating but that can, at the same time, attract curiosity in imagining future customizations and family histories for which they will provide a neutral background.

"Photography is premeditated," says Paola De Pietri, a condition that she associates with "pre-seeing a casual component" during the realization process but which returns the sensation of "being projected into the place," a displacement corresponding to what the photographer experiences during the act of grasping a transitory moment.

It is therefore essential to understand the degree of approximation that these images contain: a value that is substantiated by the social and relational forms of the new serial conquerors of the urban frontier. We can imagine, as Farinelli said, that the static nature of the photographic image is the best way to understand and recover a sense of civitas. With this exploration, Paola De Pietri helps raise awareness of urban dynamics in the Europe of the future, narrating places and spaces conceived to meet needs rather than to accommodate new metropolitan citizens. Giovanni Avosani, co-founder, with Elisa Poli, of Cluster Theory, a multidisciplinary research laboratory founded in 2011

[1] Paola De Pietri, Dittici, Text by Vittoria Coen, Roberta Valtorta, Art&, Tavagnacco, 1998
[2] Roberta Valtorta, Laura Gasparini, eds:, Æmilia, Art&, Tavagnacco, 1996
[3] Gianni Celati quoting the words of Luigi Ghirri, Nunzia Palmieri, Gianni Celati. Due o tre cose che so di lui (e dei suoi film), in Nunzia Palmieri ed: Documenti imprevedibili come i sogni. Il cinema di Gianni Celati, Fandango Libri, Roma, 2011
[4] Gianni Celati, Sul cinema italiano del dopoguerra mezzo secolo dopo, in Nunzia Palmieri ed: Documenti imprevedibili come i sogni. Il cinema di Gianni Celati, Fandango Libri, Roma