The Other Maps
Felice Hapetzeder

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I measure the city with my steps.

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Other Maps is a conceptual painting series and part of Felice Hapetzeder’s long-term artistic investigation of the city as rhythm, identity, and bearer of memory. The series includes watercolor paintings, text works, and video, exploring the visual logic of urban planning through abstraction. Each painting is based on the layout of a specific urban district: the star-shaped blocks radiating from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the dense grid surrounding Times Square in New York, Istanbul’s Taksim 360 redevelopment that replaced much of Tarlabaşı’s original architecture, and the newly completed quarters of Hagastaden in Stockholm.

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The use of granulating pigments introduces randomness and texture, allowing city plans to emerge through unpredictable patterns. This method reflects the tension between the seductive clarity of the planner’s vision and the underlying violence of spatial restructuring. These districts are not neutral spaces—they are the result of extensive redevelopment processes that have often erased previous histories and communities.

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The exhibition reflects on expropriation, gentrification, and the political dimensions of these places. Commercially driven frameworks of urban renewal tend to overwrite the histories of working-class and marginalized communities, creating a palimpsest of urban memory where visibility and permanence are unevenly distributed.

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Other Maps is part of a broader artistic research project in which Hapetzeder works with cities such as Paris, Stockholm, and Istanbul to explore how urban transformation intersects with memory, identity, and social structures. His engagement with Istanbul spans nearly two decades of site-specific and socially engaged projects, including video production during an IASPIS residency at Platform Garanti in 2007, screenings within the Gegenzeller program during the Istanbul Biennial that same year, participation in the European Capital of Culture’s Portable Art program in 2010 together with Jenny Berntsson, and collaborative projects with children from the Tarlabaşı Community Center in 2015, also in collaboration with Berntsson and exhibited at PASAJ.