Can Memişoğulları’s research on individual and social transformation processes relates to the interactions of sound, space, and digital technologies. He produces current art and music with an interdisciplinary approach. Through his art, he questions human perception and the dynamic relationship between technology and the environment. He focuses on the intersection of natural phenomena and cultural structures.
He has realized exhibitions, performances, and workshop projects with institutions such as Arter, Akbank Sanat, IKSV, the European Foundation for the Mediterranean, and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. By turning audience into participants, Memişoğulları constructs new layers of interaction. His research-oriented approach continues to expand the boundaries between art and technology while questioning the ever-changing conditions of individuals and society.
Strategies for the Endurance of Things & The Ghosts of İMÇ
The SAHA Studio process took shape around two interrelated projects: Strategies for the Endurance of Things and The Ghosts of İMÇ. Both projects trace the present day micro relations of the Istanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı – İMÇ (Istanbul Manifacturers Bazaar) as well as the cultural traces seeping in from its past. While one focuses on the worlds that objects construct by clinging to one another, the other investigates the invisible resonances circulating within the memory of the space. Together, they search for ways of thinking about İMÇ as a multilayered body that is both living and remembering.
Strategies for the Endurance of Things began with a moment I encountered while looking out of the window of my former studio. My upstairs neighbor had connected the air conditioner waste water pipe to a tree instead of letting it drain into the street. The pipe watered the tree, while the tree concealed the pipe within its trunk, forming an unplanned cooperation between them. What began as a human made arrangement thus transformed into a symbiotic relationship. This image prompted me to think about the strategies objects develop in order to hold on to one another. Some were parasitic, some commensal, and some symbiotic. I thought that one of the densest sites where such relationships could be found was İMÇ. During my field research, I traced improvised repairs, displaced objects, accidental attachments, and their relations with the surrounding environment within the fifth and sixth blocks of the complex. In the first phase of the project, I documented these relationships through photography, video, mapping, and three dimensional scanning using Gaussian Splatting. I then considered that an effective way of presenting this material would be to create an interactive digital map that viewers could navigate using a game controller. Within this environment, the stories of these relationships become visible, while the fragmented and multilayered structure of İMÇ acquires a new spatiality of its own.
The other side of this research, The Ghosts of İMÇ, began with listening to the sounds echoing from the past of the marketplace structure. The place of Unkapanı Çarşısı in the history of music in Turkey is well known. People from Anatolia would sell their belongings and come here with the hope of releasing a cassette, singing their songs in the corridors to people they believed to be producers. While listening to these stories, I asked myself: “If these voices were still echoing within the walls, what kind of sound world would we hear?” Starting from this question, I selected songs that were likely sung in the corridors during that period and produced versions that had seeped into the walls, collided with time, and undergone a process of fermentation. I then designed motion sensor music players to place these sounds back into İMÇ. By positioning these devices in different corners of the marketplace, I left them to the rhythm of the space itself. Now, every visitor passing through encounters a sound that suddenly rises from the walls. Some speak of asking for consolation, others of resentment. These tones reveal the unrecorded history of İMÇ as a ghostly orchestra that leaks into the present.
