Nanopublication — Transliterating Urban-Feline Symbiosis Through Form

Context

Istanbul is known as "the city of cats" where felines inhabit every street, alley, and doorway not as strays but as integrated residents. During my travels there, this presence was inescapable and deeply striking. The cats are neither wild nor domesticated in the conventional sense; they exist in a third state, fully urban yet fully autonomous.

This observation became the conceptual anchor for the sculpture. The merger I witnessed - cats as inseparable from architecture, moving through the city as if they were part of its structure - demanded translation into form. I used cubist geometry as my transliteration method because it allowed me to dissolve the distinction between organic (feline) and constructed (architectural) elements. The angular planes that compose the cat's body could equally describe building facades, rooftops, and the geometric shadows cast by Istanbul's dense urban fabric.

The sculpture operates within my ideamorphic practice: identifying an invariant (the urban-feline merger) and finding a formal language (cubist vocabulary) that can encode this relationship. The work is not a representation of a cat, nor of the city, but of their inseparability - the idea that survived my diffraction as observer and demanded material manifestation.