There Used to Be a Movie Theater Here

The core of the project was a guerrilla mapping intervention: we placed stickers reading "BURADA ESKİDEN SİNEMA VARDI" (There Used to Be a Movie Theater Here) with QR codes on buildings that once housed cinemas. Scanning the code took people to an interactive Google Map showing all former theater locations, with historical photos and stories for each site.

The stickers themselves became the project. Some were removed within hours—a bank took theirs down the next day, a grocery store removed it immediately. These removals were as meaningful as the stickers that stayed, revealing tensions around who controls urban memory and which histories are welcome in commercial spaces.

Other shop owners embraced them. Several remembered their buildings had been cinemas and shared stories we hadn't uncovered in our research. The stickers became conversation starters, prompting intergenerational exchanges about neighborhood history. Even people who just glanced at them in passing became participants—suddenly aware that the mundane storefront they walked by daily had once been a site of community gathering.

Field Research: We conducted walking tours through Buca's protected historic district, researching former cinema locations through archival materials and interviews with long-time residents. Each site was photographed and documented, capturing how these spaces had transformed—theaters now housing shops, apartments, or standing abandoned.

Exhibition Opening: We presented the research at Buca Kent Evi through photography, mapping visualizations, and archival materials, followed by an outdoor film screening that temporarily recreated the communal cinema experience these spaces once provided.

The stickers functioned as minimal, low-tech interventions that activated maximum engagement. Unlike a static exhibition that required people to visit a specific location, the stickers met people where they already were—on their daily routes through the neighborhood.

We weren't trying to preserve these cinemas or advocate for their restoration. Instead, we asked: How does acknowledging a building's past change how we experience it in the present? The project treated urban memory not as something lost but as something continuously produced through everyday interaction with place.

The removals became data points too—revealing which institutions felt threatened by historical memory, which businesses saw value in their building's cultural heritage, and how spatial history remains contested territory.

The exhibition opened August 18, 2021, attracting neighborhood residents, design professionals, and urban researchers. The outdoor screening recreated the social experience of neighborhood cinema culture, bringing together multiple generations who had different relationships to these spaces—some remembered attending films there, others only knew the buildings in their current form.

The interactive map became a tool for continued exploration beyond the exhibition, allowing people to discover these sites on their own and contribute their own memories and stories.