Migrating Spaces
Over a period of four years (2012-2015), an interdisciplinary team of artists and scholars investigated the design and spatial characteristics of houses built by returnees or commuting migrants in Turkey. On a total of eight field research trips, twenty Turkish provinces were visited in order to draw conclusions about the continuity and change in their lifestyles through the analysis of the returnees’ building culture. For this purpose, 132 houses and apartments in Turkey – also in their urban contexts – were mapped, examined and documented, and a total of 37 interviews were conducted with owners of 23 houses and 14 apartments. Three main typologies quickly emerged.
These typologies refer to the architectures we found, all of which emerged in the context of Turkish remigration and translocal connections and cultural experiences of Turkish-German builders as architecture without architects. We also noticed houses by returnees from Switzerland, Australia, Belgium, or the Netherlands; these, too, stand out considerably from their respective urban surroundings, thus confirming our project thesis regarding the visibility and existence of remigration architecture.
In the context of the project “Migration of Spaces”, we succeeded in shifting towards a post-migrant perspective through the exchange and collaboration with Erol Yildiz (Yildiz 2015). Migration, in the sense of a communication process, is not a bipolar conflict between a culture of origin and a culture of reception, because approach to the foreign and rejection of the foreign always happen in a mutual exchange process that also shapes the migration of spaces.