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In Turkish, the word gurbet refers to the pain of forced exile. The term seemed fitting to describe those inhabitants who feel homesick within their very own city, Istanbul. For more than a decade, the ruling powers have been subjecting the city to a shock treatment of real estate Botox injections 'Made In Fantazised Empire': a chain reaction of commercial and religious acne.

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A metropolis aligning itself with the new global order of consumerism and conservatism.

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Like tungsten mushrooms, steel islands and mosque domes sprout at the pace of megaprojects.

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In that huge, transforming city, there is an entire parallel economy of the vanished; nostalgia is bartered everywhere. The city becomes a sprawling landfill of memory, governed by a past that refuses to pass, through which snakes a melancholic dark matter that contaminates people.

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For an entire generation, the concentration of power and the muzzling of opposition for more than a decade have forced them to resign themselves to a culture of silence and this nostalgic dark matter.