THE OFFICIAL A SCHOOL OF SCHOOLS ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL WEBSITE: LINK

CREDITS: With the support of the following institutions: Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm KKH, 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial, a School of Schools, IKSV, the Swedish Research Institute SRII. Guest Participants: Aslı Kıyak İngin, Ayse Erek, Serkan Taycan, Emre Hüner. Craftsmen: Artin Aharon (Harunlar Mekanik), Mustafa Yasak (Yasa Oyma), İsmail Hız (Mert Torna), Zafer Uğurluol (Uğurlu Neon), Tur Reklam. Advisors: Daniel Urey ARKLAB, Pelin Tan, University of Cyprus, Magnus Ericson IASPIS.

Art of Disasters Interrupted, the Workshop.

REPORT: upside down in Istanbul.

Peter Lang. NOVEMBER 4, 2018.

Summary of the Report: The Workshop was launched on Sunday October 14, inside Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. The R-Lab student participants, and local students from Bilgi and Kadir Has universities along with local guest faculty were present. Monday morning 15 October, Asli Kiyak presented at the Arter classroom her research and practice on the Şişhane crafts district, the “metal jungle”. In the afternoon Asli gave a tour of the wood, ceramic, plastic, neon and metal workshops. The students broke down into 4 groups and began developing their workshop projects. Tuesday Ayse Erek met the students at the Arter classroom and presented a selection of internationally renowned Turkish artists including Gülsün Karamustafa. We also were joined by Emre Hüner, artist based in Istanbul. Wednesday afternoon at the Arter classroom we met and heard from Serkan Taycan, artist whose work focuses on large water bodies, and who developed the walking project, tracing the yet unbuilt shipping channel to connect the Black Sea with the Marmara Sea. Students meanwhile completed their projects at the various workshops. They go on to present their projects Thursday afternoon at the Arter classroom, during the publically announced session. At the end of the day’s final review session the groups document their work and placed them around the Arter space. The website https://marvelsandcatastrophes.com/ features the full Workshop Report, and separate tabs on each of the 4 participating groups in the workshop. Video documentation of the final review is uploaded on the R-Lab video archive tabhttps://marvelsandcatastrophes.com/r-lab-video-archive/

1. On the Museum of Innocence, Recollections and Collections.

To be sure, those painful September days had their dark beauty and as the month wore on I discovered an important new way of making them bearable; if I swam on my back, the pain would ease. To make this happen, I had to throw my head very far back to the point where I could see all the way to the bottom of the Bosphorus, but upside down, and I had to carry on swimming in this attitude for some time without coming up for air. As I backstroked through the current and the waves, I would open my eyes to see the inverted Bosphorus changing colors, fading into a blackness that awakened me to a vastness altogether different from the boundless pain of love—offering me a glimpse of a world without end. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, the novel. Maureen Freely translation, (London, Faber and Faber, 2009) pp 270

It was a particularly insightful experience to begin our workshop with a visit to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, especially in preparation of our upcoming workshop for the 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial. Pamuk’s museum was conceived during the writing of the book, and showcased, through a series of well-assembled dioramas and cabinet displays, the step by step unravelling of the principle character’s privileged life. The book, a mind meld between Nabokov and Proust set in an upper middleclass district of Istanbul during the mid-seventies, moves in rapid succession through a series of recollections that become collections, including delicate earrings, period movie posters, glasses of milk white raki, common salt shakers, and discarded newspapers. Each of these objects refers back to particular incidents in the book, and the book makes plenty of references to these objects and how they will be perceived by a public visiting the museum.

Kemal, the melancholic character who lives out his fictional life in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul saviors his chance to roam the museum when it would be completed. The novel’s fulcrum is Kemal’s obsessive love for Füsun, a distant cousin, who becomes the literal object of his desire. Mementos of his love, that include trivialities like a map marking all the mistaken sightings of Füsun around the city, are presented in displays labeled, numbered and mounted on the museum’s walls.

The book is not so much a forensic reconstruction of a life, as it is an ode to the process of writing. Greeting the visitor at the entrance is a large tableau with thousands of cigarette butts pinned to the wall like butterflies and each meticulously labelled by hand in pencil. They could only have come from the lips of Füsun. The museum, like the book, is an excruciating visual jewel. The experience inside the museum is not unlike the 1999 film Being John Malkovich where the main characters, played by John Cusak and Catherine Keener, find a mysterious portal that leads inside the mind of John Malkovich, who plays himself in the film. It’s a surreal roller coaster ride in which you become a voyeuristic passenger in someone else’s life. Admittedly, the narrative is locked into a specific class and gendered reading that gives only a narrow perspective on life in a city like Istanbul’s, but there are a sufficient number of self-critical digressions that make the character’s flaws appear nearly self-reflective.

Yet there is no escaping this kind of profound interiority, as Pamuk’s passage of Kemal swimming on his back in the Bosphorus sea most hauntingly portrays:

Because the Bosphorus is so deep so close to the shore, there were times when I could see the bottom and sometimes I couldn’t, but to glimpse this brilliantly colored realm, albeit upside down, was to see a great, mysterious whole, at who’s sight one could not but rejoice to be alive, humbled at the thought of being part of something greater. Gazing down at the rusty cans, the bottle caps, gaping mussels, and even the ghosts of ancient ships, I would contemplate the vastness of history and time, and my own insignificance.

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, the novel. Maureen Freely translation, (London, Faber and Faber, 2009) pp 270

In some strange way, we too, the participants of the workshop would become upside down observers of a city that would reveal itself in fragments, scents, detritus, across steep streets, cluttered tea rooms, and all kinds of displaced artefacts. For us the portal would be the amazing crafts studios and workshops of the Şişhane district, with Asli Kiyak our guide and mentor leading through this Escher like urban maze.

2. A School of Schools, and the importance of talking about design education

The Istanbul Design Biennial, directed by Jan Boelen together with Nadine Botha and Vera Sacchetti, is conceived as a School of Schools, where “everything and everywhere is a school, and every single interaction we have with a design is pedagogical.” Curatorial Essay, Boelen, Botha, Sacchetti, in Vera Sacchetti ed., A School of Schools Reader, 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial (Istanbul, Valiz and Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2018) pp. 46.

In exploiting the potential of Istanbul, the curators “sought to explode the schoolhouse’s scenography of exception from building to city. The streets become the corridors of happenstance learning…” ibid 50. And this reading of the city is the critical departure point for running a workshop like the Art of Disaster Interrupted: Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence can be understood as a backstop to a process that unravels into the Istanbul of today. The School of School’s mission, set within 6 venues around the same Beyoglu district as is Pamuk’s museum, resembles in no small way the eclectic array of collections found gathered together in Nobel prize winner’s dense display of personal memorabilia.

Some of the criticism levelled at the current Design Biennial is precisely about a nostalgia fuelled  vision of sixties and seventies design, oddly coincident with the era in which Pamuk’s book is set, (ftnt: though clearly the first is predominantly western, the latter more about the western modernizing effects on traditional Turkish culture). Yet I would see this problem more as a part of a greater nostalgic turn, where we continuously revisit the late sixties-seventies culture in the futile search for the magic ingredients of a lost revolution. We nonetheless should be resigned to the fact that this period was neither that heroic nor that revolutionary, if we consider the world we have inherited remains strewn with the debris from their often misguided judgments.

But I would not avow the significance of looking back to the sixties-seventies just yet: as I have noted in the A School of Schools Reader, the constant rejection of the status quo by this anti-establishment generation is the real takeaway for us today. Results in the end don’t count as much as the ceaseless interrogation of motives and rules in the urgent drive for real educational reform. As they had done some 50 years ago, we must do once again, by taking our struggles back into the streets. The university has changed significantly since the occupations of 1968, but not necessarily for the better. Management driven, built on the backs of a growing teaching precariat, the universities of today farm out their talent and outsource fundamental research. But no educational system can do without its students: and they will remain the most powerful and irrepressible force for change. If a School of Schools has succeeded at all, it is because it brings us back to the core issues on how design education could, through the informal work of students, rethink the most urgent issues of the day.

3. The Craftsmen of Şişhane, and Aslı Kıyak’s metal jungle

There were some unanticipated difficulties concerning the premise and organization for the R-Lab workshop in Istanbul once we had news the course would be going to the Design Biennial. The R-Lab course takes a very long view on disaster, anchored to the historic accounts on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii—all the way to 100,000 years in the future, the projected lifespan for the Onkalo nuclear waste site in Finland. R-Lab’s program for the coming academic year 2018-2019, Marvels and Catastrophes, was one of 200 projects accepted among 700 applications vying for the biennial’s 4^th edition, A School of Schools.

But unlike most of the Design Biennial’s more successful submissions that arrived as fully developed projects, R-Lab’s Art of Disaster workshop offered from the start intentionally ambiguous goals—a workshop should by definition be open for diverse forms of experiment. Most everyone has memories of an elementary school science class where one learns to make volcanoes explode, and this exercise became the kernel idea behind a makerspace in Istanbul. Once we recognized the potential of this formula, the rest turned out to be quite simple to pull together following the critical guidance of Aslı Kıyak İngin.

Asli is a designer and activist who early on recognized the profound significance of the Şişhane neighborhood, a singular and efficient network of crafts-based businesses working in very close proximity. This is a tightly knit decentralized system of urban factories whose future is threatened by displacement and gentrification, but that collectively introduce an alternative model for small sustainable industries. Shoehorned between the Funicular, Galata Tower and the Golden Horn, this dynamic neighborhood is stacked with metal workers, metal suppliers, metal distributors, lampshade makers, small lamp retail stores, related craft industries, and feed by a fleet of transporters pushing handcarts, not to mention the strategically located tea shops serving every one of these buildings. Asli characterises this area as a metal jungle: and she continues to spearhead tactics focused on keeping the area’s unique manufacturing network in this one place.

Asli is well known among the craftsmen, suppliers and storekeepers in the neighborhood of Şişhane, and she has run numerous classes with her students and students from abroad focusing on developing locally generated design prototypes. Asli walked our group through the district introducing us to a fresh way of thinking about creative making, giving us access to this distributed and decentralized factory that would be like an expanded form of makerspace. The scope of the Art of Disaster Interrupted workshop was not specifically the making of design prototypes, but rather the assembly of multivalent objects, as meaningful processes, that could express complex sets of values, dealing with post-Anthropocene, cataclysmic, and other future scenarios.

4.   Ayse Erek surveys the arts and design scene in Istanbul

 Şişhane would become in the short span of 5 days a very fertile and productive working platform for the workshop participants. But there were also the intangible experiences, that were more about inhabiting Istanbul, like frequenting the city’s many coffee houses and tea rooms, strolling the streets between simit carts and street hawkers. It’s not easy to grasp a city that has a population of over 16 million, whose horizons stretch well beyond the furthest hills, where skyscrapers march one after the other across the horizon. The metro system, ferry lines, and mini buses are straining to connect the newest of the city’s gated cities, commercial centers and office parks.

A native Istanbuler and an expert in the local contemporary arts and design scene, Ayse Erek has a close relationship with many of the Turkish artists residing in Istanbul and is very familiar with cultural events going on around the city, its international forums and exhibitions. We asked Ayse to give us an overall view on a couple artists whose work pivots around the major issues effecting Istanbul and she obliged us with an in-depth discussion on the work of Gülsün Karamustafa: an artist who has been navigating the thin line between artistic resistance and social activism from the early seventies, and whose career is continues in full swing, with recent shows in Berlin, Warsaw and New York.

Ayse in her survey of Gülsün’s work, focused on one performance piece in particular, “Objects of Desire, Suitcase Trading (Limit 100 Dollars),” for the Money-Nation Exhibition at the Shedhalle in Zurich in 1998 that strongly resonated with the kind of concerns that were also primary concerns of workshop. Through the device of a simple suitcase, Gülsün took up the role of migrant, engaging in the trade of inexpensive goods to experience first-hand the plight of women migrants and their efforts to ensure their own survival.

Writing in the online magazine SALT.TXT, Solmaz Bunulday Hasgüler and Tuna Şare gave this description of Gülsün’s artwork: In Objects of Desire, Suitcase Trading (Limit 100 Dollars) Karamustafa referred to both women and goods as similar objects of desire. Women can be bought and sold; they can be exchanged in order to buy another object. The artist set out to experience suitcase trading personally and started her project with 100 dollars, as this was the least amount paid for prostitutes in that period. She used the money to purchase various objects such as music boxes, artificial flowers, men’s and women’s underwear, makeup kits, and plastic kitchen equipment to take across the border. She opened a stall at each city she visited and documented the objects she sold with Polaroid photographs and placed them next to the stall. Solmaz Bunulday Hasgüler and Tuna Şare, “Gülsün Karamustafa: A Vagabond, From Personal To Social, From Local To Global” Originally published in Woman’s Art Journal, “Gülsün Karamustafa: A Vagabond, From Personal to Social, From Local to Global”, by Solmaz Bunulday Hasgüler and Tuna Şare, Vol. 35, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2014). Link:

 http://blog.saltonline.org/post/101409726454/g%C3%BCls%C3%BCn-karamustafa-a-vagabond-from-personal-to

What became increasingly evident, was this common thread linking several different practices that were coming together from the time we arrived in Istanbul: the collection at the Museum of Innocence, the manufactured objects and utensils found in the Şişhane district, the significance of female trade and economy using the travel suitcase. These were narrative assemblies based on collections of objects, processes, experiences, linked intrinsically to the Istanbul social context and territory. For in every case, whether chasing down a lost memory, seeking ways to reinforce an alternative artisanal economy, or describing the exasperated condition of migration, the things themselves were the key transmitters of the experience, without which there could be no visceral understanding of what really was at stake, and what such radical forms of transformation could mean.

5. Bodies and Bodies of Water around Istanbul.

Ayse introduced us to Emre Hüner, whose work echoes Istanbul’s landscapes, its ships on the Bosphorus, and the mysterious and abandoned industrial areas lying on the city’s furthest edges. The Istanbul one rarely gets to see when visiting the city for a short period of time, but essential to reading the city’s evolution, especially when considering the fragility of nature, the role of industry, and the unmitigated expansion driving today’s unrelenting economic expansion.

We benefitted greatly from the constant presence of Serkan Taycan, a veteran explorer, and whose project, Between Two Seas, addressed one of the least known and most politically non-transparent grand infrastructure projects to emerge in this area in the modern era: a new major shipping canal to link the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea. Serkan, in 2013, set out to trace the path of this colossal channel meant for a new generation of large scale cargo ships, which traversed territories and aquifers critical to the survival of Istanbul’s citizenry. From his initial efforts Serkan constructed a complete walking trail, about 60 kilometers long, which became officially designated for hikers from across the world. There is still no word on the fate of this megaproject, but Istanbul just inaugurated its newest and largest airport within this same region.

6. The Earth School, Arter.

Our daily workshops were held in the classroom space in the venue dedicated to the Earth School, located at the Arter Building. We shared our floor with a collection of ‘neo-survivial’ kits, a sort of object survey and archive called “staying alive,” brought together by the group SulSolSal. Their eclectic collection of instruction pamphlets, model houses, water filters, drone delivery systems, food robots, handmade survival tools, brought in from all over the world, were arranged neatly on the same steel shelves and open framed cabinets that our classroom table and chairs were made from. The effect was quite devastating in its simplicity. On the day of our final review, we had been given permission by the curators to place the work we made ourselves—with the help of the Şişhane craftsmen—on the same floor.

There will be more time and space devoted to reviewing the works produced for the Art of Disaster Interrupted workshop and this report will include these notes here in due time. But clearly, given the premise for the workshop, its broad geopolitical vision and anachronistic periodization, there were no real predetermined expectations on the part of the invited jurors, participants and public, that what would be presented would not fall into any simple category of things. From an earlier text written in anticipation of the Istanbul workshop: The narration of memory and objects, whether fictional or real, can provide opportunities to find different forms of creative expression. Take for example the ‘evil eye’ charm or amulet, that first emerged in the ancient Hellenic era, and that has survived through numerous religious beliefs and reforms until this day. The evil eye is considered effective in warding off disasters, serving as a protective amulet. Today it can also be purchased as a refrigerator magnet. The history of this one object transcends history and uses and represents the way certain objects or artefacts can impact on daily life over extended periods of time.

 Not surprisingly then, the students in conceiving and developing their projects, consulted fortune tellers, considered different beliefs about the afterlife and pondered reincarnation. But they also immersed themselves in the street life of the city, reflected on the abundant population of well-fed and well sheltered stray cats, the political impact of pavement and re-pavement, game theory, Arcadian life, and neighborhood solidarity, in its many forms of consensus, trust and interdependence. One question that solicited the most uncertainty, however, was what would life be like in Istanbul in 2050 given the city’s unrelenting expansion?   According to the fortune teller, not very hopeful, but then, isn’t this precisely the kind of question that should drive our current dreams and future memories? Will we still be able to make new museums of innocence?