IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper proposes a psychoanalytic rethinking of cultural heritage beyond its conventional framing as a stable repository of the past. Drawing on the conceptual shift from Freud’s representational model to Lacan’s topological approach, it argues that heritage is not a fixed object to be preserved but a dynamically structured field organized around absence, excess, and the logic of the cut. In this sense, heritage operates less as a historical content than as a visual and spatial dispositif through which subjects encounter the past. Focusing on Istanbul as a paradigmatic site where multiple temporalities intersect, the study examines how urban heritage is constituted through competing regimes of visibility. Rather than treating monuments, sites, or cultural artifacts as self-contained entities, it approaches them as surfaces that stage a relation between seeing and being seen, image and signifier. Here, Lacan’s distinction between vision and the gaze becomes central, allowing us to read heritage as a field structured by what escapes representation. The paper further suggests that contemporary artistic practices engaging with heritage do not simply reinterpret the past but expose its structural incompleteness. Through fragmentation, repetition, and spatial dislocation, such practices reveal heritage as a topological formation—one that folds inside and outside, past and present, into a continuous yet fractured surface. By situating heritage within a psychoanalytic framework, this study contributes to current debates on cultural memory and urban futures, proposing that what is at stake in heritage is not preservation alone, but the ongoing reconfiguration of the subject’s relation to history, space, and the visible.