Narrating Tarlabaşı in five postcards. This is the provocative challenge of the project.
What awoke our interest in postcards as a medium is their communication potential: split between a front, often portraying a strong iconic image and the rear, to which we confide our greetings, memories, and thoughts. They serve both as vehicles for private and intimate thoughts sent across the world and platforms to spread a new ad campaign across a city.
In this project, postcards will be used to narrate Tarlabaşı, a fast-changing neighborhood in the heart of Istanbul. A "still-non-touristic" destination, with a deep-rooted stigma linked to a tumultuous past and a contradictory present.
This project aims to challenge two popular images of Tarlabasi that have been created in recent years. Media broadcasted a pretty stereotyped picture made of run-down buildings, marginalized people, crime, prostitution.
On the other side, the real estate investors and the public authorities have proposed a glossy advertisement campaign in which Tarlabaşı looks like a fancy European-like neighborhood (“the Champs-élysées of Istanbul”). A mix of slick residential blocks and shiny offices in the city center. The juxtaposition of these images plays into the narrative aiming at the demonization of the whole neighborhood and paves the way to a new cleaned up Tarlabasi. Between these two images lies the multi-layered chaotic reality of current Tarlabasi.