Alp Serif Besen

keywords:
queer, volume, form, amorphous, pressure, reflective, unable to fit its boıundaries, leaking
software:
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Rhinoceros 5
dimensions:
1080 px (width)
date:
05.2019

Queer blobs are symbolic representations of anonymous queer “existance”s spread throughout the city. The blobs express the very ambiguous nature of being queer. They each represent a singular and a unique way of being – amongst countless. With that in mind, each image show how these unidentifiable personas interact with or occupy the urban environment. 

The first one is an amorphous yet almost egg egg-like form constrained within ties and knots. It is reminiscent of a queer person traveling on a ferry. Yet it is almost like the person represented by the blob is not traveling on the ferry but instead being forcibly pulled along the way. It has a reflective surface as for some or – in many places around the world – most queers are left with no choice but to mimic and live in accordance with the ethics and virtues of the heteronormative society. They often find themselves restricted by the limits of their surroundings. But the boundaries are often smaller than what they truly are.

I find myself in this. Even after I came out long ago, I sill wouldn’t express what I really was, but instead stage a rather likeable or tolerable social performance. Such submission was not only a survival trick but also a relocation of identity. I guess I felt like I would only be able to rediscover my true self by comparison that was initially rooted in mimicry.

Rest of the images are designed in similar ways. The image with the front façade of a building and the blob extruding out of the door is a eulogy to my past self. I imagine myself as the amorphous blob leaking or exploding out of the façade, style of which is often associated with a conservative household. The one with the columns of liquid dripping from the rooftop is meant as a reference to my contradiction to the cultural context I was born into. The building used in this image is one of the early examples of Post-Modern architecture in İstanbul. It blends traditional Ottoman architecture with the ideals of the Modern. To me, it fails in doing so. As it is with everything post-modern, the architecture only takes what’s traditional as tokens for a visual composition. Such dishonesty in the architecture that was prevelant all throughout the cultural environment I was raised in.