Empoisened Princess

2017
Live performance
10 days: 8 hours a day
Alan Istanbul, Tarlabaşı, Istanbul, Turkey
6 – 15 February
With the cooperation of Performistanbul and Alan Istanbul 

“If Tarlabaşı was a princess, to where this princess wandered, where did she live, who were her mother, her father, her friends and her lovers, why was she empoisoned, how is the treatment process…”

Tarlabaşı had been constructed in the 16th century for the diplomats and the senior managers who are working at Pera (today’s Beyoğlu). in the 20th century, the district started to change while embassies and therefore diplomats moved out from Pera to Ankara, after Ankara was elected as capital city. Additionally, while non-muslim populations suffer from discriminatory policies throughout republican history caused most of them to abandon the country, urban transformation mostly affected rums in the Tarlabaşı district. 

Throughout the time the district became the living space for people who cannot get a share from the capital including like Kurds who had to leave their hometowns due to the war, LGBTI+ population and immigrants / asylum-seekers. In 2012 Beyoğlu municipality has started an urban transformation project in order to “cleanse” Tarlabaşı. The people working in Beyoğlu district, who were also living there, have been removed from their homes; and the streets of Tarlabaşı, including many non-sovereignty cultural memories, historical buildings have been destroyed along with their cultural memory.


Empoisoned Princess which can be viewed as a kind of urban mapping, is a search towards the traces of gentrification in the urban area, scraping the urban memory, revealing the ones that are lost and/or trying to be erased.

The performance which took place for 10 days, including 7 days of being on the streets of Tarlabaşı and resting in the gallery space, 4 hours each. Standing somewhere between the lines of open workplace, installation and performance.


Leman S. Darıcıoğlu has investigated through the present state of the streets, the memory of the district, and based on the district, of the city itself and its transformation; while being in search of the variation between what has been tried to be effaced and what currently stands as reality.