Summer Homes: Claiming the Coast

Summer Homes: Claiming the Coast

Excerpt from the exhibition :

The summer home: is the everyday name of urbanites’ temporary houses on the Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterranean coasts, together with the lifestyle that surrounds their getaways. These environments, which are in use for three months a year at most, have been in vogue as a form of vacationing for middle-class families in Turkey since the 1980s. Ever since then, popular coastal areas have quickly transformed from rural communities without running water, roads, telephone lines, or shops, into odd extensions of the city. People who had once simply decked out their summer homes with the tired furniture of their main residence began to tear up whatever they could to make everything new: rooms got bigger, kitchens spread out, and verandas covered the gardens. As the golden sand of beaches was replaced by the pebbles of construction sites, houses changed hands and housing developments became something altogether different.

Those who had enjoyed their first twenty years in one summer home, were quick to migrate to another less despoiled shoreline, where the coffee shops were not yet part of a chain, for their next twenty years of vacation. And, as summers roll by, every empty spot, in already overbuilt landscapes, fills up with new luxury residences.

SUMMER HOMES: Claiming the Coast explores summer homes as the cultural invention of a certain period, situating this phenomenon in its historical background in terms of geographical and social effects.

PATTU has worked together with the curator Meriç Öner to shape the exhibitions focus, suggested objects /topics. We interpreted each topic and designed individual spaces that would form a dialogue with the issues raised by the topic. We also curated the content in forum area (entrance floor) of the exhibition which acts as a starting point to the discussion.