Aslı Işıksal

Born in Ankara in 1979. Lives and works in Ankara.

Nature is a reserve that must be utilised as efficiently as possible in a limited area within the urban economy that transforms the earth into buyable land. For this reason, city dwellers escape from this limited nature whenever they have the opportunity and head for the countryside. Partly with this intention, we decided to take another look at the parks and gardens that promise nature within the city, while trying to get away from Ankara and walk in the wild grasses of Domuzbükü, while hesitating to come kilometres away and look under the sea. As a multi-layered site, the park is a recreation area, a limited green space within the city, a photo scene chosen for special occasions, a frame for children's areas, a gathering place for neighbourhood forums, as well as a home for the homeless at night, and the site of the city's illegal businesses. While this nature fiction separates different spaces and functions from each other with invisible borders, it contrasts with its transparency within the compartmentalised life of the city.
In the summer of 2021, within the scope of the "Office Green" project, which we started from Domuzbükü and walked along the line of Ankara and Istanbul until the beginning of 2022, we tried to examine the park with its multifaceted heterogeneous structure and to retest the limits of our personal production. The idea of looking at parks, which have become demanded spaces again in a period when closed spaces are threatening, dangerous and contagious, was shaped together with our need to think together in a period when we were far from each other. We set out thinking about how a language that relies on documentary methods on the one hand and a form of production that proceeds with intuition on the other can speak to each other. This road sometimes took us to a secluded cove, sometimes left us in the middle of Bolu mountain, and sometimes we found ourselves making endless rounds in the city in order to stop and park. The present selection juxtaposes the different perspectives that make themselves felt in our modes of production, including before and after the process we started working together.