"Examining the work of Fatma Bucak is like looking down on a deconstructed map. Here we find trails travelled and then cancelled out, landscapes designed and abandoned, a geography that continually redraws itself, intertwining facts and biographies but also others removed and non-identities."1
Piecing together these narratives reveals the layers of histories in the artist's work. There is always an element that allows one to reflect on history and perceive it from an unexpected perspective.
On the occasion of Art City 2025, the artist presents her new work, Tremendous gap between you and me, a site-specific installation at the Porta Castiglione. For the installation, the gate appears overflowing with large pieces of rubble and resembling a ruin expelling its contents – as though it were rejecting the facade once served to define its existence. The ruins are intertwined with the history of the Porte di Bologna, recalling also the devastation left by the flood of October 2024. Here the visionary past is present; contemporary sensibilities must accommodate rather than attempt to obliterate it. Embedded within the rubble is a vocal – sound installation composed to reflect on Hildegard's chant – which brings a beautiful sung experience and is based on a poem written by the artist.
The indistinct heap of ruins carries with it a sense of the possibility of new life emerging from the ashes, as though to ask: from this end can a new beginning be born? The distance the artist insists on in the poem is not only that between humans, but also with non-human entities. It highlights the gulf between the living beings that share the catastrophes of the present times. The singing deconstructs itself: gradually fading away each time we hear it beneath the rubble, until it transforms into indistinct noise and then restarts. Together, the piece is almost as a requiem for destruction, a call to recognise what has already occurred so that rebuilding becomes possible.
1 From Fatma Bucak’s interview for the Fondazione Merz catalogue printed on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition in 2018.
