Displaced Memories, or the Architecture of Forgetting and Remembrance

Under the political pressure of Turkey's Modernity Project Ankara's urban-planning processes and its monuments have always been utilized as significant tools of architectural displacement in the expedience of utopias, both socially and spatially. Urban-scale operations since the 1950s, a significant conservative breakthrough as a result of global liberalism and populism, however, have overwhelmed the secular state's organized forgetting, and have increasingly demobilized the capital city's modernist collective memory into conservatively schizophrenic experiences. In this paper I aim at discovering the ever-changing qualities of collective memory and its spatiotemporal remainders within the context of Turkey's political history by addressing the forces and trajectories of identity politics