This Place Is Not This Place Anymore

This Place Is No Longer This Place, on shelves with its new edition.

Aykut Köksal's book of theoretical texts, titled Bu Mekân Artık Bu Yer Değil (This Place Is No Longer This Place), is now on shelves with its second edition. The book brings together writings ranging from architecture to urban planning, contemporary art evaluations to historiography, all within a specific theme.

In his preface to the book, Rifat Gökhan Koçyiğit says: "Aykut Köksal's analyses through time and space play an important role in his contribution to art, and especially to architecture, through theoretical studies. In this regard, Köksal reinterprets the Kantian perspective in line with the requirements of contemporary architecture and art, strongly presenting the relationship of visual arts not only within themselves but also their connection with sequential arts such as music and literature, within the context of a priori conditions.

Time and space, which Kant posits as preconditions for sensibility, are already given a priori as preconditions for artistic existence. In Kant, a priori is not a condition belonging to the object, but the knowledge of what the knowing subject adds to the known object. This is not only independent of experience and prior to experience, but also universal and necessary. While Kant includes time and space within the subject, he places them in a realm beyond the active effects of the subject. According to this, space is not determined by objects, nor time by events; on the contrary, the a priori conditions offered by space are the determining form of objects, and time is the determining form of events.

Utilizing the fictionality and representative power of art, Köksal reveals the nature of these a priori conditions, their limits, and their framework in human sensibility from different perspectives in the theoretical field. He uses the representative power of art as a lever to activate reflective thought. In second-level representative activities such as the representation of space within space and the representation of time within time, he shows how the subject can alter and transform a priori conditions to determine the constitutive conditions of artistic production. In this way, although Köksal follows Kant's track, unlike Kant, he extracts time and space from the realm beyond the active effects of the subject. Going further, he alerts the audience to the conditions of the emergence of art by demonstrating how the creative subject can take an active role in artistic activities, where time is spatialized by being represented in space, and space is temporalized by being represented in time."