Istanbuluzern Artist Residency / Unexpected Urban Superpositions

Developed with Eda Özgener, Unexpected Urban Superpositions was an artist residency project examining the relationships between water, public space, and everyday urban life in Lucerne and Istanbul. Despite their vastly different scales and urban conditions, the project explored how both cities construct distinct forms of public life along their waterfronts through everyday routines, movement, and spatial practices.

Working simultaneously in the two cities, we documented images and sounds of ordinary urban situations, collecting parallel observations from each location. These recordings became the basis for a comparative reading of the two urban environments, revealing unexpected similarities as well as striking contrasts in the ways water shapes collective life.

The project culminated in a series of speculative digital and analogue collages that superimposed fragments of one city onto the other. By merging familiar urban rituals, sounds, and spatial elements into impossible landscapes, the work questioned established perceptions of public space and proposed new ways of imagining the relationship between cities, water, and everyday experience.