While current planning for Istanbul's European Capital of Culture 2010 celebrations is focusing on the historic city centre, "Cultural Agencies" breaks out of this "cultural bubble" and shifts focus on narratives of Istanbulites inhabiting the largely ignored periphery. Here, traditional types of European and Turkish cultural institutions -museums, galleries, libraries, theatres or community centres- that accumulate in the city centre are absent. Hidden to the gaze of an outsider, the apparent void has been occupied by a multitude of new forms of "agency", informal, semi-formal, familial, kinship based, communal, religious, political. While lack of funding and support is undoubtedly omnipresent, the absence of a formal state infrastructure has been compensated for through the combined spirit of free agency, self-help and improvisation, or as an expression of simply surviving and coping with.
"Cultural Agencies" project attempts to forge a trustbased
relationship with selected local communities, conduct field surveys
with the help of architects, planners, artists, activists, students
and local residents which will lead to the participatory mapping of
existing forms of agency. An archive of institutional practice will
be constructed which also provides access to different urban
narratives. Following a spirit of partnership the granting of
access by the communities will, in turn, be met by an offer: To
jointly develop ideas and visions of how to consolidate specific
forms of agency, to imagine and implement prototypes, as well as to
plug into the existing infrastructure of one of the major, globally
acting cultural institutions Garanti Galeri and Platform Garanti in
Istanbul's centre. "Cultural Agencies" is not producing landmark
projects of the kind produced in the city centre for 2010. Instead,
a multitude of small interventions, new links and forms of mutual
access is emerging, forging a stronger identification of residents
with their physical and cultural environment, and inspiring their
participation in much needed change.
Beyond these concrete results, the project will enrich the broader,
cross-disciplinary discourse on how to intervene in an ambiguous
civic sphere, which blurs the boundaries between public and
private, stable and instable, physical and virtual, local and
global, the site-specific and the abstract and utopian. "Cultural
Agencies" will demonstrate the field of possibilities for
architects, artists, curators, activists, community leaders and
residents to discover this sphere as a space of yet unknown
collaborative possibilities.
Curated by: Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, Oda Projesi
Coordinator: Ece Sarıyüz
With contributions by: AAA (Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée), Fevzican Abacıoglu, Ayse Nur Akdal, Kamile Batur, Yigit Battal, Hakan Bozoglu, Tim Caston, Daniel Cook, Mina Cenan Çakmak, Büsra Çiçek, Ali Danacı, Burak Delier, Zeynep Sema Demir, Burcu Demircan, Gizem Demirci, Sebile Dışkaya, Shahab Fotouhi, Giorgio Giusti, Oliver Heizenberger, Shahira Issa, Duygu Kaban, Korhan Kalaycıoglu, Cengiz Karabag, Tom Kirby, Martin Kirchner, Erhan Koç, Dicle Koylan, Kurmalı Salyangoz (Clockwork Snail), Cenk Külçe, Maria Lind, Natalie Lunt, Meriç Öner, Altınok Öz, Zeynep Öz, Seda Özel, Melisa Özelkan, Ugur Öztürk, Gürcan Özyigit, Jean-François Pérouse, Kirsten Reibold, Ala Roushan, Talha Sagıroglu, Evrim Gülcan Savas, Gregory Sholette, Burak Şuşut, Cihan Sürer, Talat Sürer, Merve Tuba Tanok, Deniz Tarı, Gözde Turhan, Tugçe Tüfenk, Volkan Uyar, Federico Del Vecchio, William Wells, Paul Wild, Murat Cemal Yalçıntan, Erdogan Yıldız, Damla Özgü Yıldız, Zeynep Zilelioğlu
Project partners: Platform Garanti / Garanti Galeri, Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, Städelschule Frankfurt
Project Board: Vasıf Kortun, Pelin Dervis
"Cultural Agencies" is a non-profit initiative. The project has been made possible through the generous support of the German Alllianz Kulturstiftung and RHYZOM - a collaborative network for local cultural production and trans-local dissemination funded by the European Commission.
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Cultural
Agency has developed a Mobile Vitrine as a tool to trigger the
gathering of a so far missing material collection of evidence of
Gülsuyu/ Gülensu's urbanisation process. The vitrine has been
constructed as a plug-in frame, which can be curated by the
institutions, associations and/or individuals of the neighbourhood
in a rotating system. As a plug-in, the vitrine produces a series
of inventorized items and photographs which eventually establishes
a virtual collection of Gülsuyu-Gülensu.
