Summer Diaries

The title “Summer Diaries” refers to a season. At its core, it concerns the system created by that season. This approach encompasses a visual language related to economy, architecture, infrastructure, and consumption shaped by the coastal strip.

Antonio Cosentino’s works bring to the surface the material culture of summer, such as television, tubes, plastic chairs, shop windows, signs, and boats, with an archival approach. This is a record that reveals the systems behind the bright appearance of summer. Considering the artist’s previous practice of constructing fragmentary narratives depicting Istanbul stories, photographs, and walking memories, Summer Diaries also points to a record of the coast.

The summer season is a cultural cycle that produces practices around seasonal relocation and, along with consumption, creates a specific system of values and habits. The chairs, doors, and platforms in Cosentino’s paintings establish this sense of seasonality as a plastic reality. H. Lefebvre taught us that space is a reality produced by social relations, and in this context, Cosentino shows a kind of cycle with the beach platform, buffet, and light bulbs. If we think of space as relational and multi-temporal, the “daily” emerges even more sharply. Because the coast signifies a multiplicity of time-space where different times overlap on the same surface.

Producing the coast in this way is also a matter of governance. From a biopolitical perspective, power governs life through circulation, security, and norms, and coastal areas are also spaces that are constantly reorganized by official institutions and laws. The artist’s piers and shops reveal micro-systems where people enjoy themselves while also being governed. Thus, summer can be read not only as a climate but also as a circulation regime. Furthermore, elements such as shop windows and signs ensure that the coast is seen not as an authentic seaside landscape but as a kind of display space, and objects here become memory materials.

This leads us to Cosentino’s observation that in the shores he depicts, the sea, boats, tubes, televisions, shop windows, light bulbs, and plants are not mere backdrops but active elements. Together, they form a diverse collective that constitutes summer. Furthermore, from this perspective, summer is a cycle of maintenance, repair, wear and tear, and reconstruction, alongside entertainment. In Cosentino’s work, chairs and platforms do not confine the coastline to a dichotomy of paradise or ruin; rather, they record its daily life.

The artist neither romanticizes nor criticizes the coast. It can be seen as a light, transforming, and changing temporal process. Antonio Cosentino demonstrates this transformation through his knowledge of objects. He invites the viewer to see the coast not as a landscape to be looked at, but as a relational space to be experienced. Summer Diaries thus emerges as a visual archaeology of collective coastal life and seasonal order.