The Magnetic Apricot City A4 and Its Weak Gestures

Abstract

The advanced capitalist city is a gigantic magnet. With a number of stable and isolatable architectural structures, it is an organizing force for generating regulatory activities and ruling out their functions across its magnetic field that either pulls the things and the people toward each other or pushes them apart. This chapter shows that 'Apricot City A4', a collaborative public art project run by the artist Dilek Winchester, interrogates the magnetic field that is performed by the weak in the urban spaces between the structural spaces in Istanbul. 'Apricot City A4' demonstrates how community, as a social construct, can take different forms in spatial terms. 'Apricot City A4' behaved like a magnet and therefore introduces an increasing geographical dispersion to the city of Istanbul. 'Apricot City A4' is a critique of alienated, industrial and capitalist labor in the age of advanced capitalism.