Collaborative artistic research project
March 2007
Work produced in collaboration with Machteld Aardse, Bariş Seyıtvan, Mei-yu Tao, Omima Hasabelrasoul Ahmed, Mızgin Denız, and Mehmet Başkan.
In March 2007 I travelled with other students of the Dutch Art Institute and others to Diyarbakır in south-eastern Turkey, to take part in a workshop as part of the Here As The Centre Of The World project. This workshop was intended as an exercise in transnational collaboration, using the streets of the city as the location for artistic research and engagement.
The small group of which I was a member during our stay also included artists from Turkey, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Sudan, all of whom were from quite different backgrounds, working in different media, and at different stages of their careers. This diversity, along with the obvious practical difficulty of language, meant that finding common ground upon which to base our collaboration was not straightforward. It became obvious that our views of the city and of how an artistic intervention might be made there were sharply divergent, leading to many days of painstaking discussion about how to approach the situation in which we had been placed.
The site which we had chosen to work with was a former prison at the edge of the city, adjacent to the huge and ancient stone walls which encircle Diyarbakır. This was a space loaded with memories, history, and cultural significance, not least of which because of the fact that this city is at the heart of the Kurdish part of Turkey and of the intractable conflict which has raged between the Turkish armed forces and Kurdish separatists.
In the light of this and of the fact that the international composition of our group meant that most of us had little direct connection with this history, we decided that a political engagement with the space would not be appropriate. Instead, we chose to focus on an engagement with the people of the locality adjacent to the former prison. This was carried out through performing some simple interventions within the courtyard of the building, with the hope that these would help to “activate” the space.
These simple interventions consisted initially of clearing some of the stones and rubble around the area of the prison, an activity which soon attracted the enthusiastic participation of local children. Encouraged by this, we began to construct a “mini-Diyarbakır” – a small stone wall mirroring the shape of the famous city walls – which proved to be a powerful catalyst for more sustained engagement with the local populace. Soon, a few old men who had been former inmates of the prison approached us and without prompting began to tell some stories of their time there. This and other spontaneous engagements formed the core of the work, which became thus less about the production of an art object and more about the process of discovery and the ability of art to function as a means for intercultural communication.
The ten days we spent in Diyarbakır proved to be a highly fruitful and inspiring experience and a vivid demonstration of the power of simple interventions to create substantial and meaningful artistic results.
Thanks to Meiyu Tao and Machteld Aardse for some of the images here.
