Strolling an Urban Limit: Serkan Taycan’s Shell

Burç Kostem

“I felt that it wasn’t me approaching the city, but the city was coming towards me”. Istanbul based artist Serkan Taycan describes his experience of walking alongside the urban periphery of the city in these words. In his project Shell, Taycan walks through the hinterlands of Istanbul, portraying through photography, what could be described as an antiproductive geography, one made up of excavation sites, waste disposal areas, graveyards, even former landfill areas that have since the 90s been converted into mass housing projects. Taycan captures such sites, located at different end points of the city, in quadriptychs, triptychs and diptychs that overlap and mix in discontinuous ways, creating a strange disjunctive unity of this strange geography. Such discontinuity, he explains, is consciously curated to “represent the landscape in all its inconsistencies” (Taycan 2014). 

 Some of the most striking images composed by Taycan are those of former lignite mines located at the north of the city, in the Ağaçlı region. These mines powered the city through much of the 20th century, before being abandoned in the 1992 as the introduction of natural gas and the pressures of air pollution made the socio-material conditions of extraction increasingly untenable. Since then the pits have been used as a disposal site for construction debris, with trucks driving in and out of the site, sometimes even covertly dumping their waste in Ağaçlı beach in an attempt to keep up with the pace of construction, the industry described as the “engine” of İstanbul’s neoliberal “development”.  

In Shell these lignite mines appear side by side with images of stone quarries, located further south, near the Gazi neighborhood. Taycan likens his photographs of the quarries, such black holes of neoliberal growth, to the painting Inferno, one of 92 paintings by Italian painter Boticelli that attempt to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy (Taycan 2014). The tiny trucks in Taycan’s image, navigating an almost impossibly narrow set of dirt roads, giant boulders and rock formations, do create a feeling of uneasiness. Additionally, the image’s sheer verticality reinforces the references to Boticelli’s Inferno, creating a sinking feeling. Yet this is undermined by the knowledge that these same trucks whizz through Istanbul’s congested roads, mostly as mundane objects of frustration. Moreover, for workers, such trucks are also potential objects of terror, as it is commonplace for construction debris to topple, resulting in their deaths. In this sense, the trucks are also a reminder of the precarious conditions under which construction labor takes place.  

Turkish intellectual Tanıl Bora describes a “will to construction”, an insurmountable appetite towards construction that has characterized the Justice and Development Party’s rule. For Bora, the will to construction extends from Erdogan’s obsession with pronouncing large numbers, to the self-branded “crazy” infrastructure projects unveiled by the Justice and Development Party (Bora 2013). If one can indeed describe a will to construction at work in Istanbul’s urban landscape, the photographs outlined by Serkan Taycan presents something like the membrane of this psychogeography, its “Shell”.  

In her book Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark (2015) builds on the Marxist concept of a metabolic rift to characterize contemporary ecological crises. In Wark’s outline, contemporary ecological crises appear as a rift in planetary metabolisms, creating breaks in the earth’s production, consumption, and digestion of its own molecules. Consider the lignite that was being mined in Ağaçlı. What is lignite but a slow rumination of life processes, an antiproduction of organic matter that couldn’t be consumed and was condensed? Sand similarly appear as the by-product of a planetary rumination of rocks, through cycles of winds and waves that wear them down. Sedimentation, like the layers of the quarries in Taycan’s haunting image, is a layering and subsequent hardening of rock-excrement. Yet Istanbul’s urbanism, in its ever-widening horizons, has found increasingly novel ways to insert these molecules into the metabolism of urban production and consumption.  

How does one think of this metabolism, through the limits of the city, through its membrane and shell? There is an interest among many different authors, working out of different traditions (Crist 2019; Haraway 2016; Kallis 2019; Moore 2015), in a theorization of limits, one that begins not from an account of scarcity, like it does in most of academic economics, but rather of abundance. Indeed, many cultures do often experience limits and abundance together, through ceremonies of redistribution (e.g. Ignatov 2017).  

Perhaps such a notion of limits and of metabolism can be interrogated through the work of Gilbert Simondon. For Simondon, the time signature of life, the rhythm of life’s individuation is characterized through a peculiar relation with limits,  

“The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit… The characteristic polarity of life, is at the level of the membrane. It is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists” (Simondon 2020).   

Perhaps reading Taycan’s work alongside the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon could allows us to ask a different problem of limits, one that relates them to a threshold of collective individuation, a threshold one can encounter, photograph and perhaps even stroll. If there is a general ecology of construction, one that takes abundance as its point of departure, perhaps it is only through a limit that one can encounter it. More specifically, such a reconceptualization of limits as a membrane, a shell of collective life requires three further questions that this brief essay raises, without answering: 

1. How can we divest the notion of limits from that of scarcity and lack? 

2. How do we divest the notion of abundance, from images of mere excess and surplus to that of a threshold of collective existence? 

3. How can a limit become a lived principle of collective life, one not only having to do with its consumption and production, but also with its distribution?  

Text by Burç Kostem; images by Serkan Taycan