Video Art | Athens, 2011

The images used in this video were taken by Danae Stratou during her 6 month stay in Istanbul in 2010 for the purpose of realising her project Vital Space (Humanity) – Istanbul. During her stay she regularly flew over the city by helicopter. All the images used in this video were chosen from the aerial shots she took during those flights in order to depict the city’s multiple layers. Paths connecting order and disorder, centre and suburb, privilege and dispossession, formal and informal. The wider Vital Space project is a response to the challenges posed by Globalisation and its discontents; by the plight of the environment; by the ebb and flow of massive migration movements. A momentous urban expansion is spawning the planet’s largest cities, as wave upon wave of migrants abandon the countryside and the periphery. Meanwhile, the surrounding economic wastelands are emptied of people and left in a state of ecological fragility.