Suturing the Earth
Sculpture, Meat, Tattoo Drawing, Dimension Variable
Video, Video Installation, 7 minutes
2014
As an attempt to read the history of different places through their urbanism and architectural aspects, a very specific pattern of new development projects in the city of my current residence, Berlin, and two other cities, Beirut and Sarajevo, drew my attention. These three cities have experienced a division for a period of time, in which the city was asunder in west and east due to civil wars and state of post war. During post conflict time all three of them the area of former border, in this sense the dead zone of the city has been rebuilt. However the new built building that are now mostly commercial zones, have totally different architectural texture than rest of the city. These excrescence places remind us the past of the city rather than covering it. Although the notion of those buildings are not intentionally memorial or monumental.
Considering the city as a body, these accretions are the scar of the historical past. As the two sides of wound on skin require external pressure via stitches to get healed, which causes an eversion and eventually a scar, the act of reuniting two part of the city via rebuilding the dead zone leaves an inconsistent architectural texture.
In "Suturing the Earth" a piece of pig meat is used(the most similar skin to human skin, that is used in medical school in order to perform different stitching methods) that consists a tattooed map of Potsdamer-platz in Berlin( most conflicted area since establishment of Berlin wall until wall fall in 1989). The Cut is exactly located on the root of former wall/ border and the bulges in consequence of stitches are on same location as the skyscrapers in Potsdamer-Platz.
Potsdamer-platz contains the highest buildings in entire city of berlin, that all were build after reunion of east and west Berlin.
