Uchisar Cappadocia 23 May – 13 June 2024. Cappadox’s Contemporary Art Programme is curated by Kevser Güler under the theme ‘Changing Skies’ in memory of curator Fulya Erdemci, the founder and pioneer of the programme, who passed away in 2022. The programme takes its title from Erdemci’s exhibition ‘Regrets, Dreams and Changing Skies’, which took place at Karşı Sanat in 2001.
A Cloud on the Mountain That Block the Way, 2015
Video installation and Booklet with drawings
“Christoph Schäfer contributes to the exhibition with a video installation that he has rendered during his visit to Cappadocia.”
“Even before experiencing this geography personally, when Christoph began the series of drawings that he collected under the title The City is Our Factory / Die Stadt ist unsere Fabrik on the speculative history of the city in 2008, he started the book with drawings of the inhabited mountain of Uçhisar, Cappadocia. Christoph is fascinated by the corporeality of the architecture, which is created by carving the rocks, the shaping of a city by human bodies, rather than by strategic planning.”
“In his video installation for “Cappadocia Struck”, Christoph proposes to read the cave city as a practical critique of urban planning. “The misfortune of architecture is that it wanted to construct monuments, but the idea of (in-)habiting them was either conceived in terms of those monuments or neglected entirely. (…) The urbanistic illusion belongs to the state. It is a state utopia. A cloud on the mountain that blocks the way.”** Christoph’s emphasis on the body and the physicality as a constitutive part of social space, runs through all of his drawings, producing a spatiality that avoids, bends and alters the central perspective that creates landscapes of materialistic thinking. Having been inspired by the “menschlicheWesen (being)” concept that Lefebvre derived from Heidegger***, his drawing installation will render the imaginary everyday life of the caves as a speculative history of the “beings” who dwelled in them.”
(From the catalogue “Changing Skys”, based on a text by Fulya Erdemci 2015 / ed. Kevser Güler 2024)
With the exhibition at Cappadox we published a small booklet. In the sitze of a single, it’s also a reference to my collaboration with Sebastian Reiher aka. DJ Booty Carrel in Fulya’s second exhibition in Cappadocia, in 2016, Stüdiyo Mistranslasion.
“This booklet is a humble attempt to contribute to the memory of the wonderful Fulya Erdemci, who I miss badly. A dream of a curator to work with, with her ability to transform all sorts of dull realities into sparkling universes full of meaning.”
“Thanks to her I had two opportunities to work in Cappadoccia in the context of Cappadox festival. This booklet features the text of a new and re-edited edition of „A Cloud on the Mountain that Blocks the Way“, the song lyrics „The Inhabitants of Uchisar“. The short movie narrates – in a very short form – the geological history of Cappadoccia as a shadow play, that we improvised and filmed in one of the human made caves here. In the story, the man made landscape here acts as a kind of wonderland-of-appropriation, where inhabited space (in the full meaning of the word in the sense of Lefebvre’s interconnected thinking about the right to the city, the production of space, and the urban revolution) is still connected to the uteral, the everyday to the imaginary, thinking and building.”
“Kevser Güler, then co-curator of Fulya, was a challenging and empathic discussion-partner for the original piece, thanks again.”
“In this booklet the original text from the video is accompanied by new drawings that are drawn after the experience of „Stüdyo Mistranslaşion“ in Kenan’s Shop together with Sebastian „Booty Carrell“ Reier, under influence of erotic childhood memories awakened by a reserved visit of an upper-class Tennis club in Baden Baden with Cagla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yildiz and under the influence of my new awakened interest in „Institutional Psychotherapy“ and develpomental psychology, things I still discuss with Fulya, if only in my mind
Christoph Schäfer, Hamburg, May 7, 2024