A bullet was found in the courtyard

Of a cozy iron barred Dollhouse

Who left it there?

Who does care?

About bricks and bones In the garden?

Ma Baker’s been there

Do you know where?

The bullets tended the Sandbox?

The skull has gone

No roars went wrong

Through cozy iron barred Wallcracks

To say that the last few years of Gareth Dickson’s life have been tumultuous would be an understatement. In 2007 he fell in love with a girl from South America, packed up a few essentials from his life in Scotland, and moved to the Argentinian countryside. It didn’t turn all fairy tale at that point, however. While there he was shot at, attacked by dogs, and was involved in a very close call when the passenger plane he took to a little town in the Andes was forced down after an engine caught fire. The bullet missed, the aircraft landed, and the dog bites healed; he survived intact, albeit a little more aware of his own mortality, and a good bit more anxious.

“The bullet in all honesty was never meant to hit” he states calmly, it was a robbery gone wrong and he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The incident in the aircraft was far more terrifying because there was the agonizing time to think and reflect during the plane’s unintended descent. “It’s interesting to find out how you would react in that situation.” Dickson says. “Faced with the possibility that it’s really time up, I felt an overwhelming sense of this having been destiny, that it was impossible that I had boarded this aircraft by chance.”

These adventures are the reason that in the last 4 years Gareth has not managed to record a new album; the last two releases (Collected Recordings, Drifting Falling, 2009, and The Dance, Sleeping Man, 2010) being old material recorded before the trip. They are also the reason that a feeling of heightened alertness and anxiety pervades this new work. If Collected Recordings was in some way a study in melancholy, Quite A Way Away is a decidedly more anxious affair. “Adrenaline,” the first track on the album, opens with the lines “Distant beat, advancing feet, each of us wound within.” and in “Get Together” there is something of confusion, if not paranoia, in the speaker wondering “Who was here before now, were there only you and I all night?”

Read more at 12K

At SALT – Live performance in the Walk-Cinema at SALT Beyoğlu, October 17, 19.00.

Photos by Nicolas Brodard: “I started this photographic series in 2010 and have amended it during my frequent trips to Istanbul.

REMOTE CITIZEN, Istanbul, 15.10.2011 –

Street performance, participants conducted in public space by wireless system. The project REMOTE CITIZEN was till now performed in 17 european cities in France, Switzerland, Turkey and Armenia. More to follow..

Up to 50 actors are telecommanded via wireless intercom (remote directing).

The goal is to perceive the motion flow in public places, directly analyse it and use it in its spontaneous evaluation via performative elements. Through direct control of the actions, remote citizen influences the flow of normality, deflects it, brings it to a standstill, or speeds it up. The intervention is subtle, it gives the place a slight temporary stir that can be mysterious, eerie, or funny.

16/17/18th of ocober, Buenos Aires, Argentinia

Huseyin Bahri Alptekin’s “H-Fact: Hospitality/Hostility” artwork got part of the permanent
collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Çukurcuma is still a rather sleepy place in the busy Beyoğlu district of Istanbul.
Gentrification is proceeding slowly.The place seems to try to fit to Orhan Pamuk’s plot of the
novel “Museum of innocence”. The real museum is in the neighbourhood.