Project I am Here (2012-2014, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Rotterdam, Amsterdam)
This collaborative project by Selin Yurdakul and Şahin Özbay approaches the city as a physically and mentally constructed space. Following many and borrowing from Bourdieu it believes, "both domains (the material and the interpretive, the physical and the semiotic) work autonomously and in a mutually dependent way." The unique and ever-changing texture of each city is naturally "felt" or "lived" in our daily lives, but in our further attempts at relating to it, to "explain" or to "define" it like a fixed object is not always the best approach to choose if we want to include the features that make it unique in the first place. Narratives at this point offer an alternative.

In collaboration with local participants, project proceeds with multiple storytelling sessions where a story is created and constructed over and over again with each of us participating the process from the point that the previous had left. Parallel to a never ending construction of the city, we tell transforming/reconstructed stories. We start the storytelling session for each piece with a photograph, continue with text with a local collaborator and finish with a painting, as the initial story transforms for the third time.

Using a dialogic storytelling form, Project I am Here hopes to resonate with the multilayered, intangible and unsettled nature of the city by actively joining the reproduction process of the space/city.