I'm not good at catchy one-liners, but who can say no to a laser proposal?
Gathering materials from the Women's Library in Fener/Istanbul and from private archives, the group of activists, researchers, artists, and writers gathered aboard the Fenerbahçe Ship to engage with situated queer feminist ideas and practices. A fragmentary poetic text resulted from the workshops, addressing the current relationship between queer bodies and the city of Istanbul, a heteropatriarchal, capitalist urban land- and waterscape.
The collective text first appeared through a laser projection, cast from a rented boat onto one of the bridges spanning the Bosphorus —a transformation of a popular marriage proposal medium into one of collective political expression.
The project draws on the essay What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? by Dolores Hayden. In 1980, the American historian called for an urban politics grounded in an attachment to place and sustained through collective work on physical, symbolic, and relational transformations. She understood the city as a site for the continual (re)production of social, political, and ecological space, emphasizing practices of care, solidarity, and collective responsibility, particularly toward marginalized communities, their histories, and futures. Rather than treating urban space as a neutral container, Hayden proposed it as a field of ongoing social and political negotiation. This project extends her questions to the contemporary city, paying particular attention to the experiences and spatial practices of queer, trans, and other gender- and sexual-minority communities.
Research and writing: Asli Serbest, Mona Mahall with Ayşenaz Toker, Yelta Köm, Merve Tuna, Ömer Tevfik Erten, Pınar Üzeltüzenci, Tanja Ostojić
Camera: Hakan Sarı
Laser projection onto one of the Bosphorus bridges, poster poem, 2023
Video, poster poem to take awawy, Tarabya Kulturakademie, 2023/2025
On-site projection poster poem to take awawy, Barın Han, 2025
-
Laser projection onto one of the bridges of the Bosphorus, video projection, poster poem to take away, Tarabya Kulturakademie, 2023/2025 -
-
-
On-site laser projection, fog machine, Barın Han, 2025 -
-
-
Poster poem to take away, 2023/25
