Seite - 147 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 4/2018

147 Identity and architecture in Turkish re-migration On »Migrating Spaces«, an artistic research project Extended Abstract Stefanie Bürkle Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 4 2018, 147-150 Editor reviewed article Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 Vilém Flusser (2003), philosopher and mastermind of the digital age, has described migration as a painful and yet creative experience. The metaphor of weaving strand between past heimat and the harbouring society, and between the new life and remigration leads to the double oblivion of one’s primary cultural experience and insight (Flusser 1998, 1999). Flusser, who has been a migrant all of his life, has used the constant estrangement like an artist as a source for his intellectual inspiration – as the Turkish migrant labourers who gained a kind of freedom paid by economic hardship, resistance and prejudice. In the house that they have finally built based on their continuous and heavy labour, or in the apartment they have furnished, the oeuvre of a life finds its expression. The attention of the project “Migrating Spaces” (2013-2016) is paid to exactly these houses of German-Turkish builder-owners. An interdisciplinary team of artists and scholars has sur- veyed the spatial setting and expression of houses built by commuting migrants in Turkey. The survey was carried out in different regions of Turkey and involved 132 houses and apartments of re-migrants that were documented with photos and videos. 37 real estate owners were inter- viewed based on qualitative guidelines. In the present research, the concept of space is dynamic: the researchers avoided to consider space split, in a binary way, into locals and migrants, architecture and people, but as relational and constantly moving. In doing so, material properties of place can be related to potentials of their use and appropriation, identification and responsibility. There is no idea of national “iden- tities”, since the debate on transnationalism cannot be bypassed. The critical migration research (Yildiz & Mattausch 2009) offers a frame that is capable of explaining flexibility and context and the (?) dependency of cultural identities – identity understood as a dynamic dimension that is renegotiated for every situation (Römhild 2009). The relationship of the re-migrant and his building as an oeuvre is mirrored in the relation- ship of identity and architecture. This is particularly the case when the process of realisation is the oeuvre, not the result as a landmark or representational sign. An architecture of “selfhood” (Schoper 2010, 30) puts the oeuvre in the centre, not its author. In the context of migrational lifespans the design process at first retreats behind a protracted and changing handling of cir-