Urban Sign Language

Istanbul, a city of 15 million people, resonates with a lot of talk, that is usually with not much melody. Listening isn't as popular, so words quickly turn into chatter, which then combined turn into noise, added to taxi honks and motor roars. Messages loose meaning, sounds of you and me get lost in the sounds of the city. This chatter becomes yet another invisible barrier in our daily lives while navigating through the city. In this crowded sound-scape, urban sign language rises quickly, at times even poetically, to the foreground of our metropolitan communications.

"Sign Language is a language, which instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning." as explained by wiki-authors. Inspired by the performative silent quality of the sign language, it's not hard to imagine "graffiti" as a language, made up by paint and signs blown up to an urban scale. Graffiti is silent. Sometimes it's silly, sometimes meaningful, some say it's crime, some find it cheerfully colorful and even beautiful. 

Instead of having moving-hands in the foreground of this language, they are kept anonymous. The gesture is the image left on the wall. A guerilla art form using the city as it's canvas. Leaving behind it's message and a sense of wonder  for when and how it got there. So whether everyone agrees on it or not, we end up having street walls with customized wallpapers framing urban experiences. We wait in front of flying white creatures, we fall asleep by bright yellow fists, we buy cheap antique or used LP's leaning against sprayed propaganda.