Introduction to the project: Still Life

http://vimeo.com/35638292

you can watch the animation here

http://istanbulian.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Model photos

These are some of the photos of the model of Bernard's tomb (the outlaw bomber, lover of princess Leigh-Cheri). I tried to take photos that articulate some spatial propositions which I think the model has and couldn't be seen explicitly without framing them. I drew on top and composed them in a collage way. I don't know yet what they could become. Some of them could possibly be used in my animation, it would help get away from the "linearity" of my films up to now. 

Welding bay

This week's perspective drawing, a little rushed - something of a worm's-eye. Freshly welded steel frames for carnival floats are cooled using the brine and whey wrung from cheese curds under the weight of spectators above. C'mon guys, let's get this blog back in action.

A little taste of Turkish cuisine

Delia does a doner.

The hazards of deciding that your plan is actually the section?

From BD's Facebook page.

Ron Eglash on African fractals

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html

Peat Culture

the ‘offsetters’ increasingly insert themselves physically and metaphorically into the landscape, gradually dissolving the boundary between occupier and occupied.

Peter Calicher 3D Street Art

LetThemSitCake! by Dejana Kabiljo

Found this on Dezeen. Gabriel, this made me think of your food obsession and parts of your model. Dejana Kabiljo installed a giant sofa made of bagged flour topped with fake chocolate icing at the 751-D Park for Beijing Design Week.

Preemptive Customs House

One customs officer, two tradespeople. Two suitcases exchanged, hidden behind the propped-Palladian facade.

An attempt to create an ad-hoc environment to facilitate the government-approved suitcase trade between Turkish and Russian traders. Architectural fragments are combined to create internal environments, whilst abandoned or confiscated objects inform an ever-changing representation of the trade.

All Hallow's Eve

Size Matters

http://howbigreally.com/

Iftar Gate

- a video of a model that I've built using steel, foam, plaster, twine, plastic, cheese, dates, olives and a tulip. This is really a collage of several ideas at different scales, trying to reconcile the ascetism of Ramadan with the world's largest communal Iftar feast, attempted in Istanbul last year. This is set against the background of the Tulip Age, a period in the early 18th century that has been framed as a volatile and productive first flirtation of the Ottoman Empire with Western European modes of consumption. I'll see where this leads . . .

A story of Still life

Still life

We are in the shanty town bellow Istanbul. It resembles the cave that was recently discovered in Vietnam. The smell of light and rain is sitting on the first row of the cinema hall. We, are far at the back. Solar shafts have migrated here for one and only reason. To please the eye of Leigh-Cheri, the liberal, environmentalist princess that once fell in love with Bernard Mickey Wrangle, the terrorist. She made her world in a cave under the earth, so that it's not round and so that it has an end. In that way she could follow her lover “to the ends of the earth”. A dry moon, suitable for paper birds, hangs from the top of the tallest tree column in the garden, tomb of Bernard. Leigh-Cheri and the cyborg grandmothers buried him inside the tree many years ago. And now they make wise ruined birds out of it. “This is how love stays”, she says. The cave would have been rocky and greeny and boring like all landscapes and jungles, without Leigh-Cheri's shanty town that hosts the poor cyborgs and people who lost their houses in the earthquake of 2030. Every now and then she stitches the paper moon that sails over the cardboard sea which is covered with cellophane to reflect the birds. She is not melancholic, because all melancholy got sank in Bosporus since forever. She believes that her present is the most violent moment in time, because of the nostalgia of the future. Thus death becomes purely aesthetics. All of the princess’s birds have escaped from the ancient Mariner. That's the myth they grow up and live with till one of the inhabitants decides to make a toilet extension in his house and use them as a roof. The birds are wise because they are romantic. And they are romantic because they have never seen the moon. Leigh-Cheri finds her solitude romantic and has a wing on her arm that makes her feel like Odette. Her hands though, drink the pulp of rotten vegetables like mosquitos in the hot summer nights, while she wonders weather Ferhan Mimar is ever going to finish the construction of her palace. She remembers the time she got buried in a pyramid with Bernard by her jealous Egyptian husband, and had to make a bomb and blow herself up to open a hole and save her beloved terrorist. They both ended up deaf. By the first quarter of the twenty second century, the vegetarian princess will have eaten the jungle.

My story and characters are taken from and inspired by:

Tom Robbins- Still life with Woodpecker*

Samuel Taylor Coleridge- The rime of the ancient Mariner

Ettore Scola- Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi (Ugly, Filthy and Mean)**

Pier Paolo Pasolini- Uccellacci e Uccellini***

Michel Gondry- The science of sleep

*more specifically: the characters of Leigh-Cheri and Bernard, the fact that they were trapped in a pyramid by her husband and she had to blow it up, the fact that she wanted to follow her love to the ends of the earth, the cardboard sea and one or two more ideas are taken from this novel. Also, the book adresses the issue of "how to make love stay". Robbins says that the answer is: "through mystery".

**this film tells the story of a family that lives in a very poor shanty town in the periphery of Rome.

***Pasolini says for this film: Hawks and Sparrows was my movie that I loved and I love more, first of all because it is "the poorest and the most beautiful". One of the three main characters in this film is a raven, an intellectual of the left before the death of Palmiro Togliatti.


Also: I am not vegetarian.

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