Umut M. SATICI
M.Arch Graduate Student
Sound-Index: Antakya Between Loss and Reconstruction
This exhibition does not present care as the preservation or memorialization of a lost condition. Rather, care should be understood as attentive listening and reconstruction. In Antakya’s post-disaster environment, care takes the form of archiving the ephemeral and easily overlooked aspects of urban life, focusing on the less visible layer of the city’s memory, its sound.
The display features an immersive audio installation that allows visitors to explore two timeframes: Antakya in 2022, before the disaster, and Antakya in 2025, after the disaster. Importantly, the exact moment of the catastrophe is deliberately left outside the scope of this research exhibition. Instead of emphasizing the catastrophe by reducing it to the moment of disaster, the installation focuses on illustrating the changes that happened on the site.
To construct the contemporary soundscape of Antakya, I collected field recordings during my visits to the city on March 13th and 14th, 2026. I selected 52 points across the area and recorded one-minute audio clips to capture the city’s current acoustic environment. These recordings include fragments of everyday urban life, environmental noises, construction sounds, and human activity. Rather than functioning as objective acoustic measurements, they operate as an archive that informs the installation’s speculative reconstruction of Antakya’s post-disaster environment.
The changes are examined using 2 distinct scales: the urban scale, which covers a larger area including the Orontes (Asi) River and the historical city center, and the building scale, which focuses on 2 specific places that were affected and a part of Antakya’s historical fabric, namely Uzun Çarşı and Affan Kahvesi. On top of the 3 platforms displaying the 2022 and 2025 maps of Antakya is an array of speakers that creates a limited simulated soundscape, offering a glimpse of the changes that occurred on the site. The 2 stands house Affan Kahvesi and Uzun Çarşı, along with their 3 states: 2022 pre-disaster, 2025 post-disaster, and their new locations.
This installation primarily emphasizes the connection between then and now, achieved by comparing how Antakya used to sound with how it sounds today. However, it also acknowledges a fundamental limitation: because archival practices have traditionally prioritized visual media over sound, there is no definitive record of how the city sounded before the disaster. As a result, the installation can only speculate on and reconstruct fragments of its former acoustic environment. Additionally, it admits its own boundaries. Not all sounds can be archived, and not all memories can be recovered and reconstructed. By excluding the immediate moment of disaster, the display risks silencing the trauma experienced in the attempt to avoid its exploitation. Relying on available recordings and speculative simulations introduces gaps, distortions, and biases. These “failures” are not resolved but remain embedded within the installation, making visible the imperfect nature of caring through representation.
