Dîwar
the wall
Kurds make up the fourth largest ethnic group in the middle east, and have been called the largest nation without a state. The turmoil that exists between Turkey and the Kurds has been present since the establishment of Turkey in the 1920's, and includes events such as the Zilan Massacre which took the lives of thousands of Kurds. To speak the word Kurd was banned by the Turkish government until 1991, and the Kurdish people have active in peaceful and non-peaceful rebellions in order to attain basic civil rights, and further, a Kurdish Nation State.
This unstable regional history helped to narrate, explore, and conceptualize what the location of this project means to the people around it, and what an observation structure could symbolize.
The competition brief presented a site deep in historically Kurdish territory, and the intervention became an opportunity to explore the contextual political effects of an equal playing field; a space in which no single ethnicity is represented more than another, a place where Turks, "Mountain Turks", and visitors can all feel welcome.
