BARTU KAAN ÖZDİŞCİ - DREAM MACHINE

My father was called İbrahim Özdişci. He worked as a radiologist in Izmir, Turkey. As a child, I sometimes accompanied him to the hospital. X-rays in the hospital darkroom are my earliest memories of photography. In the summer of my teenage years, we would go on multi-week road trips to the southeast and to the Aegean coast, which was not yet so developed and built up. We pitched our tent from day to day and I returned exhausted from folding and unfolding it so many times. I was also very bored from being only around adults. My father's camera was an escape route that allowed me to be alone and to stroll around on my own a bit. My father drove a 1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle (VW 1303), a turquoise blue L380. In retrospect, this color code conjures for me a golden age, one made of recklessness, of sharing and of freedom of movement.

As I was studying in Arles, faced with the restrictions linked to the Covid 19 pandemic and the erosion of civil liberties in Turkey, I felt the need to reconnect with the levitating power of this turquoise color. My father's car was sold after his death in 2010, and most of my friends have gone into exile all over Europe, from Lisbon to Berlin. But I still have my dad's sleeping bag that I can fold and unfold like our tent used to be, and in which I can travel as if in a dream machine. 

After a year and a few months abroad, I had the chance to return to Turkey to visit my mother and I made a few excursions that followed in the footsteps of our past travels. I attached a few of the photographs I took during these excursions on the turquoise duvet and occasionally spent the night with them. When I woke up, I recorded my dreams, my disillusionment, my hopes and I shared them with friends scattered all over the world. Our situation might seem like an endless fall, but we still have the relief of the turquoise color to hang on to.