Spatial Attunement to Political Violence: A Drawing Practice in Arslan Yatağı Alley

Abstract

This article develops spatial attunement as an architectural way of working with political violence. It begins from a critique of empathy as a distribution of interpretive authority: after violence, empathy can quickly decide what the scene means, whose vulnerability becomes legible, and which details are treated as background. The case study is Arslan Yatağı Alley in Istanbul, a narrow service alley that became a site of police violence during the 20th Istanbul Feminist Night March on March 8, 2022. As a cramped space shaped by service infrastructure and surveillance, the alley concentrates affect and movement into a pressured corridor, where spatial arrangements participate in the event’s unfolding and aftermath. The article is practice-based and focuses on a single drawing from The Disinherited Fitment. Drawing is used here as a method of attention rather than depiction: it stays with residues, fitments, and routines that carry the afterlife of the encounter. Spatial attunement is developed through a triangulation of practices—architectural ethnography, site writing, and allegorical drawing – that work through fragments and indirect relation. The resulting work shifts emphasis away from bodies-as-image and toward infrastructural and affective residue: pipes, AC units, drains, thresholds, broken surfaces, and their charged arrangements. Following Sara Ahmed’s critique of empathy as a mode that can re-center the interpreting subject, the paper positions spatial attunement as an alternative to empathy; a political spatial practice of expanding what can be known about an event through the alley’s material record, and by holding proximity and limit together as conditions of architectural engagement.