Up until moving to Bakirkoy, Istanbul I had worked doing all kinds of things. Translator, human rights reporter, editor, grant writer, archivist, etc. I had been hoping to get back into human rights again and thought that Istanbul would be great seeing that my first memories of the place were with my mother, the UNICEF activist, at the Habitat II conference. Little did I know that there wasn’t really a human rights culture in Istanbul, let alone Turkey. I got one job with UNICEF editing some reports for them, but that didn’t pan out into anything else substantial. Not to mention the fact that it took them almost three months to pay me, something I would come to find as being quite normal in Istanbul.
Bakirkoy was very isolated. I didn’t feel overly comfortable on public transportation to go off on my own, and in general I didn’t feel comfortable around Turkish men period. I would find that if I was in a café alone I would have all kinds of weird men coming up to me, and even the waiters would behave very strangely. I soon found out that women who sit alone in cafes are generally prostitutes, so there went my most favourite thing to do out the window. Bakirkoy simply felt like miles away from anywhere I wanted to be, and it was quite literally true.
Since our apartment was such a shithole, I decided there could be no harm in painting it and doing it up a little bit. At the time we were planning to stay there for a couple years; Steve had been given a serious promotion at his job with fantastic pay and things were still hopeful in a way. I was waiting to find more work and in the meantime I began to paint the walls. In the past, I’ve always painted or made art on whatever was available to me. I used to paint on boxes mainly, because they were always around and easy to dispose of if need be. Who’s going to feel bad about throwing away boxes, even if they have art on one side? (I would soon realise that I would feel very extremely bad about all the art I had thrown away over the last few years and my isolation in Istanbul heightened this to a degree of sadness I never thought would be possible.)
I started by painting all the doorframes in the house. Orange, canary yellow, Amazon green, and purple. Then I painted a large octopus-looking thing over a horrible water stain on the wall that came to be recognised as Dr. Zoydberg from Futurama. Then came some strange fish, a crocodile, a large snake, coral, a manta ray, mermaids, seaweed and lots more. What started as an attempt to cover-up the shoddy state of the apartment turned into a live-in aquarium. Sadly, more art that I had to leave behind. However, and on the plus side, if it weren’t for all that artmaking, I probably would not have lasted anywhere near as long as I did in that place. Well, the artmaking and the cats. They were my lifeblood.
For some reason, it never worked out for either me or Steve to be social in our aquarium. We tried to organise parties and they never really worked out. It would have been such a great place to have big dinners with friends and take lots of fun pictures with the artwork, but somehow the dinners and friends never really materialised until we were just getting ready to leave the country. But I suppose that’s how life is sometimes.
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Wow, another link between us! For me it was the first time I’d ever had the opportunity to paint on walls and I really had fun with that. Although it was terribly sad we never had any parties to be able to show off the artwork. Yes, the bright colors did indeed help feel better about life there and from time to time I wonder if all that art is still on the walls or if it’s been painted over already. xoxo
Sezin, I did the same thing too, in our Selcuk apartment. Abit owned the building, and though it was only about 12 years old, it was already crumbling and depressingly beige. So every wall got painted bright colors, suzani patterns around the ceiling, touches of gold here and there. Our nargile cafe got the same treatment, and you know, I don’t have many photos of either place. I know what you mean about leaving your art behind…but all those bright colors helped me deal with my big life transition. XO!