The Meeting Point project is an international gathering around art and creativity, taking place in a rural setting with participants from different cultural backgrounds. It is a mobile project aiming to collaborate with local initiatives and to take place in a different village each year. It consists of a series of events around the central backbone of three hands-on workshops on visual arts and local cuisine.Meeting Point intends to create at least a week long community where cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary experiences will be shared, where the village would be a playground for creativity during the day and could be converted into a festival venue at night with theatre, music and screenings.
At Gülpınar
Meeting Point is interested in using various creative art disciplines to harmonize differences, raising a respectful awareness on self and each other’s rights, duties and on the complementary nature of differences, in an innovative manner. It contains workshops during the day, and a festival program at night. It t can be conceived as a counterbalancing mobile project aiming at forming a creative platform disarmed from urban prejudices, through art. Meeting Point is respectful to the delicate border of making a place visible or attractive, without deteriorating it is one of the most sensitive issues around the project.
The first meeting point was Gülpınar, where participants from France, Germany, Korea, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, USA and Turkey had the chance to meet between August 6-12, 2007. Gülpınar was a meeting where the city dwellers of Turkey discovered their own existing culture and sub-cultures, see who they really are and create a reasoning, a model and an understanding of the microcosmic immigrant communities in Istanbul. The international participants did not only have a chance to come into contact with contemporary Turkish culture, arts and artists, but also would be able to see ‘the real Turkey’ which is a lot broader than represented in the foreign media. For the villagers, arts was brought into the village, trying to give them a chance to have their own opinions on contemporary understanding of aesthetics, allowing them to discover and observe international and national arts, artists by transporting “city” art into their village.
WORKSHOPS
The workshops in the Meeting Point: Gülpınar project formed the core with different target and teaching groups of all activities that was carried out during the week. Even though each workshop would be dealing with issues specific to that discipline, there was an underlying leitmotif that unites them all. In that sense, each course was also a means to document different aspects of life in Gülpınar. The idea was not only to be able to bring life force from a different source and of a different origin into the space of this particular village, but also to be able to find a way of bringing people from different backgrounds together in a working environment.
Photography
The workshop concentrated on building narratives, making use of the rural environment, the history, geography and the local community. The participants were encouraged to form their own style, attitude and interest; accumulating a personal stock of images and forming a track record. The workshop acted as a ground for improvement on the technique of taking pictures as well as being a collaborative experience in producing a final exhibition that is bigger than its parts.Course Leader: Ahmet Polat
* The exhibition has been realized with the support of Dutch Consulate-General in Istanbul
Video: EntropyTV
The workshop focused on creating short video narratives, shot in a single take. The whole process is also an act focusing on the economics of video narration. The course highlighted the difficulties of the single take and will concentrate on ways of transforming the idea from conception into a narrative. The videos, shot from the moment of turning the camera on, to the moment of turning the camera off, with no interruption and no editing, are published online on the video-blog of entropyTV.
Course Leaders: Sabine Küper and Thomas Büsch
Local Cuisine
Having international participants as audience, the local cuisine workshop was led by the women of Gülpınar under the guidance of a food expert. The idea behind utilising local people as teachers in the food workshop was to balance the aims of having an international gathering in a Turkish village with the goal of converting the whole project into a shared act among the international participants and the villagers. The participants prepared a different local meal everyday, under the guidance of the course leader, allowing them to experience the local culture from its original source. The creative part of the workshop was designing a full meal for the last day of the project, converging cooking methods and customs learned in the village with participants’ own.Course Coordinator: Hasan Acanal
Cartoon
There is a village over there, even though we don’t write about it or draw a picture of it, is it still our village?* Held together with the children and youngsters of Gülpınar, the workshop will focus on the contents and sources of humour. After the discussion sessions, the participating children will find situations in Gülpınar that could be subjected to humour. The process will be followed by converting these findings into cartoons.
*Translation from an anonymous Turkish song.
Course Leaders: Mehmet Çağçağ and Tuncay Akgün
Music
The workshop aims at opening a new window to the children of the village who do not have a music teacher by gathering a children’s chorous. During the festival they will work on a small repertory which will be shared with the village at the end of the week.
Course Leader: Çiğdem Ergun, teaching at Music Education Department at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University
Creative Drama and Dance
The workshop will focus on cognitive, perceptional and motor development of the children of the village, in combination with studies increasing the recognition of body and developing self-awareness. The objective of the workshop will be attained through a puppet production.Course Leader: Özlem Ergun, teaching drama courses at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Physical Education Department.
The results of the course together with the Music Workshop presented at the last day of the week, at various locations in the village and end up in the village square.
SOCIAL WORK
In order to encourage interaction with the village, each workshop participant was expected to join a social work group. Social works include basic tasks such as picking up vegetables, watering plants, mowing grass, painting walls that would help the villagers in their daily burden, or assistance in preparation of the festival. There would be a maximum of 6 hours of social work in the whole week.At Gülpınar, the social work worked as a creative amalgamate of children, adults and all the participants; an additional area of work trying to offer a helping hand to the village on a task chosen by the municipality. Social work was an opportunity where all the participants from different workshop groups worked alongside one another. The task was to paint a bare concrete wall, where the people involved in the process were full of enthusiasm and willingness in knowing each other and working together.
The process started with all the participants, children and adults, standing in front of the wall holding each other’s hands, while some of them were drawing the outlines of each other with chalk on the wall. Once the outline of the silhouette was transferred onto the wall everyone started to paint the exterior with blue paint. Preparing the stencil, being covered in blue paint, working towards the same goal and doing so with a visible energy of togetherness was one of the most moving moments of the project. FESTIVAL
The activities taking place every night all through the week within the frame of the festival aimed at creating a common ground for the audience including local inhabitants and international participants.
Çanakkale Caz Kent @
Çanakkale Caz Kent @ is a local sound improvising on local music with jazz riffs. Having had individual musical experiences before, the band members came together with the leadership of Tamer Bektaş, instructor at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Department of Music Education to form Çanakkale Caz Kent@. In addition to latin and jazz standards, they interpret some Turkish numbers with a jazz approach. The members of the band are Özgür Bektaş in vocals, Tamer Bektaş at piano and keyboards, Süleyman Şeker at trumpet, Kerem Güvenç at bass and Kadir Güvenç at drums.Öykü Özsoy - Artist- Run- Spaces and Artist Collectives in Istanbul
Focusing on artists’ collectives in Istanbul, Öykü Özsoy raised crucial questions of having a sustainable structure, creating a communication platform between themselves and local authorities and international funding bodies while protecting their independent position from cultural normalization, as well as how this culture has found its path in the city for last ten years against the current political regime suppression.Murat Meriç - Turk-iş FUNK Party
In his special DJ set for Gülpinar "Türk-is Funk" party organised in the village square, Murat Meriç’s played Turkish pop songs from the 60s and 70s obviously appealing to the whole crowd. The night program immensely popular among the villagers as well as the international participants, starting from the Turkish pop music of the era influenced by western forms and moving towards the folk music of the region, lasting for more than three hours, ending up in a wide circle dancing sequence traditional to the area, performed by the whole audience in unison.Open-Air Cinema
The screening night endeavoured to please the audience in a Turkish way were the screening of a kitsch/trash Turkish movie from 60s with English subtitles. This was also an attempt to re-enact the atmosphere of the open air movie theatre the village had some 40 years ago.Playground Company - The Head in the Clouds
PLAYGROUND is a method of working and researching in the world of the object, giving it new meanings in surprising contexts. It expands the role of the puppet making it the protagonist on stage, enveloping ideas and symbolising a human being, but more importantly reversing the role between the puppet and the actor/manipulator. Head in the Clouds was rewarded the Premi FAD Sebastià Gasch 2005–2006. It is a visual show that is about adults, told through the soul of a child, reflected by objects which are related to children and are the protagonists of the performance: Toys.MEETING POINT: GÜLPINAR TEAM
Project Directors Ece Pazarbaşı (TR), Yiğit Adam (TR)
Project Coordinators Nimet Doğan (TR), Fleur Dronkers (NL)
Technical Crew Yigit Adam (TR), Abbas Akkaya (TR), Dagmar Albert (DE)
Course Leaders:
Music Çiğdem Ergun
Creative Drama and Dance Özlem Ergun
Cartoon Tuncay Akgün, Mehmet Çağçağ
Photography Ahmet Polat
Video Thomas Büsch, Sabine Küper
Local Cuisine Course Coordinator Hasan Açanal
Local Cuisine Course Leaders Afet Bostancı, Nilüfer Çakır, Mukadder Evci, Naile Işık, Mukaddes Ünal
Special Thanks to:
Ozan Adam, Savaş Arslan, Xavier Bobes, Julià Carboneras Girgas, Murat Ertel, Marina Hil, Stefan Kaegi, Kristina Kramer, Murat Meriç, Erhan Mahmuzlu, Yeşim Oruç, Ceren Oykut, Öykü Özsoy, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Ümit Torun, Eylül Uçar, Melih Uçar, Mine Gezgüç, Erkan Başa and People of Gülpınar
Photographs by Jozef Amado, Korsan Afiş, Ece Pazarbaşı, Dominik Skrzypkowski, Melih Uçar, Martina Maña Vintro
*For more information please contact meetingpoint2007@gmail.com
*Meeting Point: Gülpınar is realized under the umbrella of
Diyalog-der
Molla Çelebi Çeşme Çıkmazı 1/3
34427 Beyoglu/Istanbul
Turkey
Project Partner
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