"The Invisible Medina" 

A Post-Apocalyptic city as fiction-based dreams’ research, 2018 ongoing 

A Prototype of Plan 01 Stockholm, Sweden, 2018.

If we are not able to keep or protect our cities, if we are not able to dream on our future cities, what about entering the phase of discovering the invisible city in a dream!

Walking is an act of healing and mind’s purifying. For me: walking helps to create, to still feeling free by being able to move and it helps me to sleep at night. Recently, my insomnia has been developed due to my anxious life’s conditions and the life around us in general, I started to walk more than I used to and very insistently.

In one wintery evening in Stockholm, I drifted around 6 hours in the city, I returned home completely exhausted and I slept immediately, that’s what my brain only needed.

I remember this night because of the dream I had in it.

In my dream I saw that we (people) become invisible to each other amid a nightmarish neutral-like architecture where there was no light coming from the sky, the sun has died and all the stars have fallen down, it is not a daytime or night-time, it’s only a monochromic dusky scene in front of my eyes, no artificial lights to help the one to see anything. The light which allows the one to see this Post-Apocalyptic scenery is coming from inside the eyes. It is an absolute silence, no laughs, no screams are heard, no tears, no feelings, no air to breathe, It’s neutral, fatally neutral, without life but it’s not dead yet.

Suddenly, I started to hear a narrator in my dream telling me that what I see in front of me are the two last remained cities in the world from the east and the west coming together as one because time and distance for these cities have different notion and concept from what we used to know, these two cities were/are the invisible cities of the life we know, they are existing also on earth, but everything about them is happening in parallel since they were/are not seen for us. In my dream all other cities (The visible) have vanished, all memories, all traces, architecture, civilisations, nothing at all but these two “Medinas”- as the narrator called them- which they appeared to me/us because the invisible is finally visible when we become invisible too. 

It was fascinating for me to have the feeling of the dream visiting this Medina, something I cannot really describe only in words, for this reason, I started to think about mapping and researching my dream/s, working in the fictional space of that dream, and trying to transcribe different walking practice which the brain could take to discover while it is sleeping; it is a new phase of Wanderism “Mind Wandering” research. 

I became more interested in the imaginable places the brain would like to discover during the sleep which is another kind of brain activity or it could be another parallel invisible life.

In this installation, I am presenting the prototype of the plan 01 of The Invisible Medina, as the first step of my research on the post-apocalyptical city as fiction-based dreams’ research.