September 12, 2025 – November 3, 2025, Küçükhan Ayvalıka

On my first holiday trip to Patriça Bay in Cunda, I was deeply moved by the ruins of a stone house near the room where I was staying. The walls, left standing as the house slowly collapsed over time, felt like the shell of a home, fragments of what once was. While swimming in the sea and looking at these ruins, I wanted to create something there, without nails, paint, or anything that would disturb their structural integrity.
As I thought about what I could do, one day I came across a shop in Ayvalık’s bazaar selling staff uniforms. Among the variety of clothing, the kitchen aprons caught my attention. While I was looking at their colors and models together with the three women working there, I realized that the apron is a hidden symbol of women’s everyday labor at home. Yes, I would leave the invisible traces of this labor on the ruined walls.
On my way back to where I was staying, a ruin caught my eye. I stopped, intending to do my first apron-hanging performance there, and walked over to a wall that I believed had once been the doorway. Once, this opening and wall had separated the interior from the exterior; now they gathered both “inside” and “outside” into the same threshold. Inevitably, as I looked at what remained of the house’s structure, I tried to reconstruct its memory, and I felt a pang of sadness. I hung the apron in the doorway, fastening it through the existing joints between the stones. The apron, caught by the wind, transformed into a living presence.
It was no longer just an apron I had bought from the bazaar in Ayvalık. For me, it became like a pendulum swinging between past and future. Perhaps it was once a sign of the labor that made the home a “private sphere.” By hanging it there, I felt I was making domestic labor visible. Because this ruined wall had become, for me, both a stage and a public space. With the multilayered migration stories of Ayvalık in mind, the apron seemed to flutter like an ownerless flag. In my thoughts, where the notions of “house” and “home” overlap, I felt how fragile the sense of belonging to a home could be. Just like the apron shifting with the wind, everything in my mind was moving, changing places: mother, caregiver, craftswoman, migrant, worker, those invisible figures.
In the same garden, I hung another apron on a small wall opening. There, I found fragments of broken glass and pottery, nails and hinges, traces of a life once lived. I wondered if people passing by on the road would notice the aprons hanging on the ruins. I imagined someone stopping, curious, and walking over to the wall to peer inside. What they would see in that emptiness is not a room, but what remains of one, perhaps even their own diminished homes, our homes. The aprons I hung evoked the idea that once, people lived here, cooked, raised children. It felt like an attempt to leave a trace of sound in the silence and wind, after those who had left.
In the following days, I noticed the cemetery behind these ruins. This must once have been a small chapel belonging to the Greek cemetery in Cunda. In the garden of the ruins, the traces resembling opened family tombs reinforced this feeling. On the sea-facing wall of the ruin near my room, the house that had first inspired me, I hung a green apron, its color taken from the olive trees around it. I left it there so I could see it every day. Watching it dance with the wind, I found myself reflecting on displacement, invisible labor, and placelessness. That is when a name appeared in my mind: “Hanging House.”
“Hanging House” became a fine tension I built between my everyday holiday life and history. Everything that once belonged to the interior now surrendered to the winds outside. This apron, dancing in a choreography with the wind, no longer belongs to a body, nor serves a function. It is only hanging, on its own. Ownerless, speaking through its very lack of ownership, like a counter-monument.
Though domestic labor has always been the least publicly visible form of work, it is what sustains society the most. Yet even today, it remains confined within household walls, ignored. Let these aprons be the silent cries of women burdened by the weight of invisible labor imposed on them.
My third site was the ruins of the Evangelistria Monastery on Güvercinlik Island, believed to have been built in the second half of the 19th century. The stone walls, standing silently in the coastal winds, once breathed with the life of a small women’s monastery. Locals called it the “Girls’ Monastery” for that very reason: it was not only stone and mortar, but a vessel for the prayers, labor, and silence of the women who lived together there. The aprons I hung here became like windows opening not to the sky but to the past. The fluttering of the fabric seemed to reconnect the hands of those women; each apron swaying in the wind whispered a forgotten name, called back a lost story.
In their coming together, the aprons carried not only a silent lament for community, but the resistant light of solidarity, invisible labor, and women’s memory. It was as though, reaching out from beyond time, women were holding hands again, filling the emptiness of the monastery.
My fourth site was the small chapel ruins on Hasır Island (Seferi/Angistri), known as St. George’s (Agios Georgios) Chapel. From afar, it appeared as a straight line in the middle of the sea, a house silhouette, a tree’s shadow. The island’s bareness concealed, within the endless water, the dream of a house, the presence of a tree. That is why my son and I were so deeply moved by this geography.
The simplicity of the island was not emptiness, but the expression of a profound memory. The aprons stretched upward, as if imagining a roof for the chapel, merging with the tree and the voice of the island carried by the wind. The rabbits living there added a fragile innocence to this retreat.
My final site was one of the small stone houses in the second village of Patriça Bay. It was one of those I had first seen from the sea, the one that inspired me. I wanted to complete my last performance in one of these village homes. The settlement contains about 15–20 houses. Built with local “garlic stone” and designed in response to the region’s characteristic winds, the houses embody the architectural identity of the place.
I began by hanging a single apron in a gap. In the sway of the fabric, I felt the inspiration of invisible hands and forgotten breaths. Now, in another house in the same village, I hang one more apron. This final gesture, carrying the trace of the beginning, completes the memory: I began here, and here I bring it to a close.
In the “Hanging House” project, my aim is neither to romanticize the past nor to blame the present. My wish is to make one feel that, within these ruined walls, a story still breathes. Everything left behind by time, and everything that belongs to now, can be remembered anew.