'Why do chimneys remain standing while everything else is torn down?'

Both breathing and polluting

Seeing chimneys, symbols of industrial production, as the city’s “respiratory organs”—how does this connect ecology with the collective memory of the city?

If a city can breathe, it means it is at peace with its past. Chimneys are the most visible, yet also the most forgotten symbols of this breath. Today, with contemporary issues like energy production, the climate crisis, and artificial intelligence, new meanings are being attached to concepts such as “heat” and “consumption.” To me, the chimney remains a metaphor of that old energy: a presence that both breathes and pollutes. The photographs in the exhibition try to hold this duality, the sustaining and the destructive, within the same frame.

How do you think the silence that chimneys carry today enters into a dialogue with the development ideals of the past?

That silence actually reminds me of a very noisy past. From the first industrial initiatives of the Republic to the private sector, chimneys were always vertical symbols of “progress.” Today, the same chimneys represent abandonment more than production. That’s why their silence makes me feel both pride and sorrow. It’s a silence in which the hopes of an era are frozen in stone structures.

In your photos, chimneys appear placed into the void of the sky. What does that void mean to you?

That void is actually a kind of space for silence. When you photograph a chimney against a sky cleared of clouds, nothing remains but its form, its function, its history, even its location, are erased. Then you can engage the viewer only through form. Perhaps that void is the space between memory and forgetting. The place where the unseen breathes.

Starting to notice chimneys

Architect and artist Buşra Tunç wanted to translate the idea of the “view from inside,” which she sensed in my photographs, into the exhibition space. The structure resembling a shell brings the viewer closer to the feeling of being inside a chimney. The photos displayed inside the shell were presented in their original color versions, unlike the printed black-and-white photos, and a connection was established between the mechanical sounds in the videos and the black-and-white photographs on display.

While I looked from the outside with my photographs, Buşra created a form that invites inward. This way, the exhibition became not only a visual experience but a journey of spatial awareness. Photography and space spoke the same language.

In your opinion, which structures remain invisible in the memory of cities, and why are chimneys at the center of this invisibility?

Cities remember structures at eye level. But chimneys are always up high—in a place that is visible but unnoticed. That’s why they live in a kind of “visual blind spot.” For me, this invisibility is precisely the domain of art: forms that remain outside of daily life but exist silently. Perhaps that’s why chimneys represent the unconscious of the city.

Finally, what do you hope a viewer notices about chimneys and the city after visiting the “Unseen Monuments” exhibition?

I would hope that, upon leaving, a viewer raises their head just once. That they no longer see those silhouettes merging with the sky as ordinary structures, but as stories, memories, traces of labor. And maybe, for the first time, they notice a chimney in their own city that they pass by every day. Because to notice is actually the first step to remembering. Tuğçe, thank you very much for this interview.

(TY/VK)