European Cultural Foundation

Report by Nermin Saybasili, curator
Project coordinator for Platfom Garanti, Istanbul (www.platform.garanti.com.tr)

For the project Atlante Mediterraneo, a group of young artists from Istanbul is conducting their research individually. Here I want to make a special emphasis on mobility, a mobile artistic practice and analysis, on a Deleuzian ‘nomadic becoming’, which allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge. Before we started to work on the project, I had this idea in my mind: as a city like Istanbul we should not try to define it, but reveal the complexities and the net of interconnectedness it carries in itself. The artists took “their own journeys” on the topography of Istanbul. Through their “mappings”, the city remains “soft” accommodating fragmented and heterogeneous, yet inter-connected constituent parts through which the tensions disappear and the interactions occur.

The research of each artist is turning to be a series of works: an audio-visual installation which focus on the life of an Ukranian woman living in Istanbul (Pinar Asan), an installation-work which deal with the ghostly presence of the minority groups (mainly the Armenians and the Greeks) in the city (Hera Buyuktasciyan), a group of photographs displayed in public settings (Deniz Gul), and a set of posters which mimic the missing posters by operating as a “virus” in the public domain (Adnan Yildiz).
Me and the artists do not only want to present the work in spaces allocated for the exhibitions, but also use the public space, hoping that the works can make possible to contact the inhabitants of the towns more easily and directly. I think that the result is satisfactory.

What can we learn from this? I believe that this should urge us to think both the production of public space, its control and regulation by the authorities, and the role the artists and curators can actively play, the models that can be developed.
For my part, it was important to meet the Lebanese journalist Bilal Khbeiz during the first workshop and cultural exchange in Italy, and listen to his experience as being one of the members of the Atlas Group in the past and as being a journalist in the city of Beirut. The workshops I am taking part in and their results are very interesting, as we intend in our project to make the inhabitants of the town to look at their city differently, as we aim at making them to participate to the artistic process. We are learning to cope with the situations and making use of them at the most possible and productive ways.