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Baysal’s photographs may have been tagged as “urban transformation” or “gentrification,” but to me they are images of environmental violence more than anything else. This is violence against the built as well as the natural environment—vernacular buildings as well as rivers and meadows, and ultimately the earth itself. This, moreover, is violence not just against but also through architecture. It supplants buildings of a more humane-scale—buildings whose builders and inhabitants are one and the same—by an architecture of pomp, power, authority, and gigantism. As a result, Baysal complicates the various binary oppositions that underpin the ways in which this state-endorsed enterprise is often presented to us. Politicians and policy makers have been telling us that this is an initiative of “urban renewal,” but what we now see is ruination. The entire enterprise is predicated on a recently issued “Law on Disaster Prevention,” but it has wrought such havoc as to mimic disaster itself. We constantly hear of Turkey’s “construction boom,” but these images portray profound destruction. The violence Baysal has captured therefore blurs the often taken-for-granted boundaries between renewal and ruination, construction and destruction, and disaster and its prevention.

Eray Çaylı



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