Lens-Based Media Artist Isik Kaya is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the multimedia project ‘Monuments’. To see Isik’s body of work, click on any image.
“The dictatorship of the automobile—the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance—has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever-wider dispersal.” – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Monuments show a world that seems alien, although they perhaps spring from the most common experience one can have in Southern California: driving a car. These infrastructures of speed and power form gigantic concrete layers that dominate the landscape. They are the “accidental” monuments of the economic system we live in: a system that ignores the environment and human needs in order to provide itself with maximum efficiency.
The fossil fuel era has been in crisis for a while now, and it seems the system we are living in is slowly collapsing. Given this situation, the series takes on an ambivalent quality. On the one hand, they seem like the echoes of the promise of a better future, and on the other hand, like the concrete prison we have built for ourselves.
All images and text © Isik Kaya
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By Isik Kaya
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