The first glimmer of realization that there was no escape from politics, even in the saturated West, came when I got off the bus in Paris' Concorde Square. Benoit, whom I had met at a festival of architecture students, helped me through the first days of adapting to the life of a poor scholarship student in one of Europe's more expensive capitals, where Poles were described as "alcolo, catho et moustachu" ("alcoholic, catholic and mustachioed", hmmm, I wonder why?). During a frank conversation about our career plans, he uttered sentences that overturned my previous humanistic and artistic and how naive thinking about my future profession. "Architecture and urban planning are so strongly connected with power and influencing the future that I decided to go into politics. Why stop at half-measures?" - stated the as always prejudicially nice drifter wearing horn-rimmed glasses and with a watch worth several salaries of my old ones. When I asked in the voice of a pink cartoon bunny: "But what do you mean?", he laid out before me a landscape of concepts that no one had mentioned to me until then, either at my architect parents' house or at the Faculty of Architecture. Mitterrand and his Les Grands Projets, the distribution of taxes and money and how much goes to what infrastructure, the responsibilities and visions of city mayors, HLMs and topping up money for social spending, including construction, before every election, absurd gifts ofof cultural and sports infrastructure without reckoning with the cost of maintaining them, public-private sector connivance in the creation of local plans, pressure from big developers on city governments, public interest and NGOs demanding various amenities for residents. And so on. The pink bunny from distant Lechistan's eyes and muzzle grew wider and wider, as it suddenly became apparent that in a democracy politics is even more present than in an authoritarian system, and more players means a greater level of complication. Despite this sudden and essentially uncomfortable broadening of my horizon, I decided to continue feeding the vision of me as a pink bunny. I spent the year of the Paris Fellowship savoring the new forms around me, sinking into nights of mock-up making and generally, as my former partner put it, "masturbating with chiaroscuro."
Unfortunately or unfortunately, with the end of my studies, politics began to appear in my life more and more often. So did economics, because eventually both concepts creep into our adolescence to such an extent that they can obscure the entire horizon for many adults. At some point, I began collaborating on art projects that were part of larger cultural diplomacy programs. So I ceased to be surprised by ministerial briefings, didaskalia of insiders spoken in whispers in the corridors of various institutions, embedding my projects in "broader contexts of advocacy," or my own dissuasion of various officials from attempts to name my project after tragically deceased politicians. "Imagine how valuable it would be if we dedicated this square and this installation of yours to a great one of our...," says a disheveled voice in the earpiece.
History, and with it politics, began to catch up with me more and more often, even shooting at me from behind the vinyl. For example, at a dinner in Berlin, when my Turkish curator confessed that her name was on a list of "enemies of the state" drafted by Prime Minister Erdoğan's entourage after we had jointly done a project for a system of tents that served as itinerant centers for promoting civil society in the Turkish countryside. Its head was even arrested and held without trial in detention on the pretext of providing aid to terrorists in the "mobile training centers" he funded, which turned out to be my ill-fated tents. The first assembly of tents for an NGO educating Arab minority youth and children in the city of Antakya was before my eyes. I landed there at a moment of heightened tension due to increased hostilities in Syria, located just a few kilometers away, from which thousands of refugees were being dragged, sometimes fired upon by Syrian fighters. The city was full of strange people, some expectation, but also frenetic traffic. Reporters and people of fast business descended from everywhere. Groups of bearded Muslim fundamentalists and vigilant looking dudes with the faces of regular thugs roamed the streets. I checked into the hotel, waiting to be contacted by the organizers. In the evening at the hotel bar I was puzzled by a guy I had seen earlier unloading technical-looking boxes from a minibus with a group of similarly dressed gentlemen. They were all of one height, short-shaven, youthfully limber, despite their apparent middle age. Black and dark gray pants with insets of reinforced material at the knees and shirts, as far as I could judge, made of a blend of cotton and quick-drying polyester with added lycra. "So what's your job here?" he asked leaning against the bar with a glass of gin in his hand. Thinking little and not wanting to elaborate too much, I replied, reaching for my best all-Slavic accent: "I'm an architect. You?" The guy smiled, endearingly clocking my practical garment made of a blend of cotton, polyester and lycra with his eyes. "Insurance business," he replied. "Let's drink to that!"
The more haters, paranoids or professional cynics around us, the more likely anything we do will be considered a political gesture. The more their actions bring drama and conflagration, the more politics will be glued to us like dog poop to our soles. The more politics enters our lives, the harder it will be for us to prove that we are not a camel. Unless, of course, being that noble animal, or whatever new identity is necessary to survive in a polarized reality. And then it may turn out that it is not only more comfortable, but definitely more exciting to be a camel precisely. Let's drink to that!
