A Dialogue of Presence and Absence

You asked whether art is an act of making or an act of unmaking. I keep returning to the body—how it moves, how it interacts with its surroundings, how it carries within it both creation and destruction. Marina Abramović’s journey across the Great Wall of China mirrors her father’s march across Igman, not as an act of survival but as an act of transformation. The body, when pushed to its limits, reveals what is unseen, what has yet to be made.

But if art is about making, does the body not also serve as an instrument of erasure? The city, too, bears the weight of both presence and absence. In Notes on the Disintegration of the City, Jennifer Malvezzi discusses Archigram and Ugo La Pietra’s visions of architecture as dynamic, participatory spaces—places where individuals are not passive inhabitants but active agents of transformation. The city is not a fixed structure but a field of possibilities, where bodies create meaning through movement, occupation, and disruption.

Public space, like the body, is in constant negotiation with itself. Krzysztof Wodiczko speaks of buildings as ideological instruments, controlling bodies as much as they invite them. A building’s aura—its warmth, its monumentality—imposes discipline, turning the observer into an unconscious participant in its power structures. If the city is an extension of the body, then does the act of unmaking architecture—of disrupting its imposed order—become an act of reclaiming the self?

La Pietra’s Videocomunicatore envisioned a world where media and architecture merged into a communicative space, where private bodies could leave traces of their existence in public. The city, then, becomes not just a container but an archive of its inhabitants. But what happens when those traces are erased?

The struggle between making and unmaking is, in the end, the struggle of the body itself. We create to leave marks, to ensure we are seen, but every act of creation is also an act of erasure. A sculptor removes matter to reveal a form; an architect destroys space to shape a new one; a performer pushes their body to the limits, dissolving their identity into the experience.

If art is an act of making, then what we make is always vanishing. If it is an act of unmaking, then perhaps what remains is more real than what was ever built.

So I ask: can the city, like the body, be seen not as a structure, but as an event—one that exists only as long as it is being lived?

Yours,
İlke