Inci Eviner
Acting in the Library started on a meeting and working platform, which I named "the Working-space" , and then we decided to transform this space to a stage. we began to invite the concepts and norms to this stage.
About 7 months ago, a group of young artists and the students of Kadir Has University came together with an open call and wanted to search and experience the idea and the space of the library by performative practices.
That was also being in a search of a different method; to form a space beyond the restrictive curriculums of art education, and I thought, the triennial could be a good opportunity for this particular education method. I considered the invitation from Tbilisi Triennial in this way and we came to a resolution to share our experiences in here.
The Questions that I ask myself about art education; How could I break the learner-instructor hierarchy?
Among the people who responded to the open call, there were some, who has been producing and exhibiting artistic works for a while. I was open to surprises about this matter, even a veterinarian could have applied for it.
In Turkey, public universities are tuition-free, but with some of them the education-curriculums are determined by the ideology of the party in power. Students are selected through aptitude tests and central examination system. On the other hand, Foundation Universities behave timidly to open departments like art which have no profit.
To overcome this; Could I form mobile, in-between, unsteady, independent, experimental, open spaces?
Instead of dividing my life into two professional parts like an artist and a professor, could I bring the art production and artistic research areas together and transform this in-between area to an exciting experience?
Could we practice performative research method for education?
Except for adjusting theory to practice, could we let practice invite theory to life and internalize it? Articulating with life, could we turn Istanbul into a workshop instead of the classrooms in the universities?
At the first meeting, before deciding where we should start, we pointed out the traps: we stayed away from a research method which is descriptive, didactic, declarative and, artificially fitting theory into art, and tried to find an action area rather than methods that are based on qualitative and quantitative, logical thinking. We did not consider production as our target; the works that arose have become side-effects for us.
So we formed a playground by searching what art has contributed to the world and put these contributions into action. Staging some series of norms carried us out of limited identification areas. Certainly archive researches, literature, artistic productions were the actors of this stage- just like us.
....
Initially, being a group of 20 people, some left, a few months later we were 9 people. Meeting once a week, from time to time we invited guests like dramaturgist, dancer, sociologist to the stage and joined their games. The chaotic atmosphere at beginning, became clearer when everybody discovered his own research method and acting together created small groups, individual disengagements happened- until everyone erased his face.
Initially, what we felt
Action is like an operation
EMRE
There was too much motivation and information. Therefore I had been offended by the library and to get re-acquainted with it, I ran to the nearest library and at the reference desk I asked it about "itself". And told it to show me all the resources which included the name, "library".
Rather than reflecting the theory to practice, is it possible to search the new potentials that the practice offers theory ? Would library be a center of an operation?
CEREN
We are drowning in information but starving for knowledge
Act: Find the girl with the glasses in the scanned picture.
Could I approach the library as sort of an operation center which interacts our bodies with the texts? Act: Move on darling, move on darling
CEREN
"Bringing intellect and order to the world, is a pathetic effort..."
Act: Turn the antenna on, turn the antenna on, turn the antenna on
ASLI
“A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.” A. Manguel
Act: Record the dots from zero to forty two
ASLI
"The Tower of Babel remained standing as an evidence of our belief in the oneness of the universe."
Act: Hear the scratchy sound ,hear the scratchy sound
EMRE
First of all, the memory is like a library that hasn't been put in alphabetical order, featuring the complete works of no one's. Act: Find the distance between the dots
DİDEM
“Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.” A. Manguel
Act: Turn yourself around tree times and jump and turn around again and again.. and gain..gain.. repeat eat eat eat peat...
MUJDE
"Every choice excludes the other. The act of reading is an everlasting act of censorship."
Acting in the Library started on a meeting and working platform, which I named "the Working-space" , and then we decided to transform this space to a stage. we began to invite the concepts and norms to this stage.
About 7 months ago, a group of young artists and the students of Kadir Has University came together with an open call and wanted to search and experience the idea and the space of the library by performative practices.
That was also being in a search of a different method; to form a space beyond the restrictive curriculums of art education, and I thought, the triennial could be a good opportunity for this particular education method. I considered the invitation from Tbilisi Triennial in this way and we came to a resolution to share our experiences in here.
The Questions that I ask myself about art education; How could I break the learner-instructor hierarchy?
Among the people who responded to the open call, there were some, who has been producing and exhibiting artistic works for a while. I was open to surprises about this matter, even a veterinarian could have applied for it.
In Turkey, public universities are tuition-free, but with some of them the education-curriculums are determined by the ideology of the party in power. Students are selected through aptitude tests and central examination system. On the other hand, Foundation Universities behave timidly to open departments like art which have no profit.
To overcome this; Could I form mobile, in-between, unsteady, independent, experimental, open spaces?
Instead of dividing my life into two professional parts like an artist and a professor, could I bring the art production and artistic research areas together and transform this in-between area to an exciting experience?
Could we practice performative research method for education?
Except for adjusting theory to practice, could we let practice invite theory to life and internalize it? Articulating with life, could we turn Istanbul into a workshop instead of the classrooms in the universities?
At the first meeting, before deciding where we should start, we pointed out the traps: we stayed away from a research method which is descriptive, didactic, declarative and, artificially fitting theory into art, and tried to find an action area rather than methods that are based on qualitative and quantitative, logical thinking. We did not consider production as our target; the works that arose have become side-effects for us.
So we formed a playground by searching what art has contributed to the world and put these contributions into action. Staging some series of norms carried us out of limited identification areas. Certainly archive researches, literature, artistic productions were the actors of this stage- just like us.
....
Initially, being a group of 20 people, some left, a few months later we were 9 people. Meeting once a week, from time to time we invited guests like dramaturgist, dancer, sociologist to the stage and joined their games. The chaotic atmosphere at beginning, became clearer when everybody discovered his own research method and acting together created small groups, individual disengagements happened- until everyone erased his face.
Initially, what we felt
Action is like an operation
EMRE
There was too much motivation and information. Therefore I had been offended by the library and to get re-acquainted with it, I ran to the nearest library and at the reference desk I asked it about "itself". And told it to show me all the resources which included the name, "library".
Rather than reflecting the theory to practice, is it possible to search the new potentials that the practice offers theory ? Would library be a center of an operation?
CEREN
We are drowning in information but starving for knowledge
Act: Find the girl with the glasses in the scanned picture.
Could I approach the library as sort of an operation center which interacts our bodies with the texts? Act: Move on darling, move on darling
CEREN
"Bringing intellect and order to the world, is a pathetic effort..."
Act: Turn the antenna on, turn the antenna on, turn the antenna on
ASLI
“A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.” A. Manguel
Act: Record the dots from zero to forty two
ASLI
"The Tower of Babel remained standing as an evidence of our belief in the oneness of the universe."
Act: Hear the scratchy sound ,hear the scratchy sound
EMRE
First of all, the memory is like a library that hasn't been put in alphabetical order, featuring the complete works of no one's. Act: Find the distance between the dots
DİDEM
“Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.” A. Manguel
Act: Turn yourself around tree times and jump and turn around again and again.. and gain..gain.. repeat eat eat eat peat...
MUJDE
"Every choice excludes the other. The act of reading is an everlasting act of censorship."
Act: You look ugly in every picture- dead pan shaky head don’t be sad
SAFAK
"Every library, by definition, is a result of choice and has to limit its realm. So with every choice, it excludes the other. What is can not be done/ what is undone becomes the choice. The act of reading goes parallel with an everlasting act of censorship."
Archibald MacLeish
Act: Because you are incomplete ,because you are incomplete
SAFAK
Is reading dangerous?
"Absolute power should require all the readings only to be official. ... Whatever the form, the censorship is the derivative of power and throughout the history of reading, from papyruses until today's books, the fire of the censorship burns... Voltaire; The delusion of the book-burners is the belief of being able to initialize the history and destroying the past..."
Act: erase your face and be a shadow and move through history
EMRE
This whole search that I am in from the very beginning, the information I have saved, the images I have collected indicated me a mental library within itself. And that has led me to an idea of spatial digital structuring by making it possible for me to face this matter.
“He runs after facts like a beginner, learning to skate, who furthermore practices somewhere where it is forbidden”
CEREN
First I went into the school library, I realized the space between my personal experience and knowledge, I thought that space might have been a stage.
act ,somebody you’ll be a star in somebody’s else’s sky
EMRE
What is the meaning of experiencing a space? Realizing yourself in a place or defining myself with the place? I stand alone in the middle of the library, I must move and rip off the relation that I have built within my daily practices and my ordinary approaches to the library.
I wanted to lie down on the floor- from here where I look, the library could have swallowed me-
And all together we became lost in the books -The Library at Night ,The History of Reading and Dreaming by the Book. Everything was so interesting, we driven away among all those texts.
The only way to get away with that was to enact the quotes- Judith Buttler Greetings and Salutations!
Act, The whole process is a ‘’modus of being’’
ASLI
We tried to sample the texts and quotes we have read -that was a mistake- we were imprisoned by the limits that sampling brought - as we realized this was a trap - we transposed our organs (transposed the senses).
We thought with our feelings and felt, acted/moved with our minds - we reversed it- we realized the impossibility of the expression- all the things we have tried in transforming knowledge to expression was a trap and we tossed them out- "I have an idea" - trash ideas
CEREN
And we invited guests
A dramaturgist ; Drama in the Ancient Greece to state the state of the acting text etc..etc...-
A performance artist; book was invited to the stage as an object and enacted - different reading positions were experienced-
EMRE
What is the meaning of moving on the text? A library where the words turn into sculpture - is it possible to think of a book? Could the books within the books be a strategy to expose the relations between the texts (mapping)? We started with the performative readings by following Elaine Scarry. We decided to actualize our library in a structure by going ahead with mapping. In this structure, everybody had a cell on his own and thus from the collective act to individual act and from individual to collective we began to work on a dynamic form of relation. In order to not get lost we invited The Trial by Kafka to the stage. And started reading the trial from our backs.
And when we came back from there we decided to give ourselves in this process
Act, there is no doer,I’m doer,I’m not doer
CEREN
We are drowning in the information but starving for knowledge Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge
And to hell with the cencors! give me knowledge or give me death
The outer and the inner clock relentlessly go their different ways. Outer time functions as usual. Inner time accelerates savagely, "devilishly", "demonically." It is driven by forces such as a relentless self- scrunity that reflects on reflections of reflections endlessly, with terrifying swiftness.
Didem Erk:
-Some passages are deleted by the author-
What kind of an act is to lend books to the library instead of borrowing ones? How would an unregistered one leaks to the system and would it provide a possibility of an encounter? I wrote my own poem between the lines and consigned it to the library.
Could the library operate as a working space where one writes but not reads or produces but not consumes? Is it possible to see a library as an atelier? And I sat by a desk - sat and wrote letters to a person unknown and I wrote them for days. I left the dated letters on the desk- in the library – to the library.
What sort of meaning gaps would translations of a book create? If each translation is an interpretation, is the book a continually changing meaning- would translations act continually- could they create a space of act- I erased, spoiled, excluded and erased by acting in the realm of the book- and formed a new space - words that were said, leave its verbal existence to written images and they turn into actors.
It proposes a form of physical reading - transformation of a surface to a book - Lines are interrupted - I suggest an impossible form of literal comprehension - these are the remaining spaces of the six e- books of different translations on Franz Kafka’s Trial which are accessible on the internet. I deleted some passages which do not include the word “trial” in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and German.
"Every library, by definition, is a result of choice and has to limit its realm. So with every choice, it excludes the other. What is can not be done/ what is undone becomes the choice. The act of reading goes parallel with an everlasting act of censorship."
Archibald MacLeish
Act: Because you are incomplete ,because you are incomplete
SAFAK
Is reading dangerous?
"Absolute power should require all the readings only to be official. ... Whatever the form, the censorship is the derivative of power and throughout the history of reading, from papyruses until today's books, the fire of the censorship burns... Voltaire; The delusion of the book-burners is the belief of being able to initialize the history and destroying the past..."
Act: erase your face and be a shadow and move through history
EMRE
This whole search that I am in from the very beginning, the information I have saved, the images I have collected indicated me a mental library within itself. And that has led me to an idea of spatial digital structuring by making it possible for me to face this matter.
“He runs after facts like a beginner, learning to skate, who furthermore practices somewhere where it is forbidden”
CEREN
First I went into the school library, I realized the space between my personal experience and knowledge, I thought that space might have been a stage.
act ,somebody you’ll be a star in somebody’s else’s sky
EMRE
What is the meaning of experiencing a space? Realizing yourself in a place or defining myself with the place? I stand alone in the middle of the library, I must move and rip off the relation that I have built within my daily practices and my ordinary approaches to the library.
I wanted to lie down on the floor- from here where I look, the library could have swallowed me-
And all together we became lost in the books -The Library at Night ,The History of Reading and Dreaming by the Book. Everything was so interesting, we driven away among all those texts.
The only way to get away with that was to enact the quotes- Judith Buttler Greetings and Salutations!
Act, The whole process is a ‘’modus of being’’
ASLI
We tried to sample the texts and quotes we have read -that was a mistake- we were imprisoned by the limits that sampling brought - as we realized this was a trap - we transposed our organs (transposed the senses).
We thought with our feelings and felt, acted/moved with our minds - we reversed it- we realized the impossibility of the expression- all the things we have tried in transforming knowledge to expression was a trap and we tossed them out- "I have an idea" - trash ideas
CEREN
And we invited guests
A dramaturgist ; Drama in the Ancient Greece to state the state of the acting text etc..etc...-
A performance artist; book was invited to the stage as an object and enacted - different reading positions were experienced-
EMRE
What is the meaning of moving on the text? A library where the words turn into sculpture - is it possible to think of a book? Could the books within the books be a strategy to expose the relations between the texts (mapping)? We started with the performative readings by following Elaine Scarry. We decided to actualize our library in a structure by going ahead with mapping. In this structure, everybody had a cell on his own and thus from the collective act to individual act and from individual to collective we began to work on a dynamic form of relation. In order to not get lost we invited The Trial by Kafka to the stage. And started reading the trial from our backs.
And when we came back from there we decided to give ourselves in this process
Act, there is no doer,I’m doer,I’m not doer
CEREN
We are drowning in the information but starving for knowledge Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge
And to hell with the cencors! give me knowledge or give me death
The outer and the inner clock relentlessly go their different ways. Outer time functions as usual. Inner time accelerates savagely, "devilishly", "demonically." It is driven by forces such as a relentless self- scrunity that reflects on reflections of reflections endlessly, with terrifying swiftness.
Didem Erk:
-Some passages are deleted by the author-
What kind of an act is to lend books to the library instead of borrowing ones? How would an unregistered one leaks to the system and would it provide a possibility of an encounter? I wrote my own poem between the lines and consigned it to the library.
Could the library operate as a working space where one writes but not reads or produces but not consumes? Is it possible to see a library as an atelier? And I sat by a desk - sat and wrote letters to a person unknown and I wrote them for days. I left the dated letters on the desk- in the library – to the library.
What sort of meaning gaps would translations of a book create? If each translation is an interpretation, is the book a continually changing meaning- would translations act continually- could they create a space of act- I erased, spoiled, excluded and erased by acting in the realm of the book- and formed a new space - words that were said, leave its verbal existence to written images and they turn into actors.
It proposes a form of physical reading - transformation of a surface to a book - Lines are interrupted - I suggest an impossible form of literal comprehension - these are the remaining spaces of the six e- books of different translations on Franz Kafka’s Trial which are accessible on the internet. I deleted some passages which do not include the word “trial” in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and German.
the doors of law are-
recalling the doors of the library-
which gives the sense of being neither inside nor outside, it is there-
the threshold-
Şafak Çatalbaş:
Remains of the Road
I started with my sitting meditation experience in the library, sitting and mental traveling- I have searched for the conflict between sitting and the acting of the mind- I have pondered how I could visualize
this.
Failure errorrrrrrrr
Failure errorrrrrrrr
When setting out in literal terms both visual and verbal expression
...
Word on the road
Remains of the road
Wrong has the right
to be old
...
(For the performance: "as a scanner")
Body in the mind embodied mind law and justice - for the laws made with reason, an offer as an answer in case of not stepping out the duality of the mind and body completely: a territory between enact and act- the laws that are made in mind, processed in the body and then printed out, (body as a scanner) - it is processed in other minds-bodies- mind as a scanner-
Heads under the cloth, limbs remain uncovered- we went down under the table, the cloth covered our heads we were in semi-darkness, we lit our torches to be able to see the texts before us, there were texts of law, they were passed from hand to hand, it released what is kept by the silently reading memory, it screamed and shouted.
The typewriter on the table wrote the new ones when recording the revealed.
Laws are enacted and minds are acting the traces of memory, process always triggers others in the
other minds in the other bodies... PROCESS continues with losses, constantly changing new processes in other minds- movement and transformation -
Aslı Narin:
Another Library
In my cell, I came out with an idea of disposition of the images in the space that would generate a visual labyrinth. ** Following Borges - the library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which thus repeated would be an order: the Order - I placed myself as a voyeur in that eternal cycle and I formed a transparent tunnel with the photographs I took. The transparency of the images accompanies the infinity of the knowledge. I transformed myself into a hidden eye in the library. I developed my research around using transparent layers to give depth and eternity to an image or a sentence.
Emre Sağlam:
Sollicitare in the Library
When experiencing the proposals of Elaine Scarry considering dreaming by the book, the literary example she gives as a reference which I figured it would be as effective as The Trial by Kafka , I thought of this novel as a space I could act on. And I tried to catch the gestural movements. The references that were led by these movements opened in various texts and drew me into a different process of dreaming, these concussions and gestural approaches, my search in the library, basically occurred in two different acts. These two videos are interactive and simultaneous documentations of my research process relating to cinematic fictionalization. In the second video I directly tried to reach for the trial by getting at the center of all the map-like, imaginary and gestural approaches and I went exploring the reference acts in the trial. This attempt is an inner reply to the concussions in the first video.
Müjde Bayraktar/ Ayşenil Şenkul :
Cultivated Books
Our first research was about a modular book system, the results of this work required the library as a perception of architectural structure. In time we moved away from this idea and proceeded to an organic solution. When we turned our faces to the nature, we saw that to obtain knowledge, to wonder, to search, to reach for relative conclusions, to make new beginnings from these conclusions are processes that flow parallel to the natural cycle of life. As an expression of this cycle the plant has become a metaphor. The knowledge which spewed out of the books forms an organic relation with celluloid environment of book leaves by its nature. Old encyclopedias, categorized knowledges suddenly turn into a living- alive garden. The book reunites with the nature as a substance and serves a living, an organic system.
Orkun Aziz Aksoy :
Worldshelves
In this work, I took "the text" as the subject. I tried to demonstrate that the only thing which takes text and structure together is a library, based on the suggestion that a library resembles the structure of a piece of text which consists of letters, words and sentences whereas a library consists of letters, words, sentences, books and bookshelves.
My work consists of two different parts -as structure and text- which can be related to each other by interrogating text-structure connection. Instead of creating a new text, I chose the words from
fundamental rights and freedoms chapter in the constitution randomly, then as if constructing a building, i brought these words together in a form looks like poetry which is difficult to define if it is meaningful or not. A chapter in the Constitution is about prohibited books and this reminded me of bookshelves resembling cells which stand disconnected across each other.
As a structure this is a bookcase I built into my construction, by mounting box shelves which could contain a single book horizontally to the wall. as meant before, by changing its structure , this bookcase offers a reversal of the order of letter, word , sentence, text, book and bookcase.
The structural similarity between the structure and text is stressed by placing each boxshelf on the projection of a word of the text written on the wall in front. ...Liberties loyal to personalities / non to be divided to be removed / nobody's guiltier as the crimes other than deaths
Ceren Acun :
The Silence Epidemic
During our research, we almost made a surgery on the library- we laid it on the table, started cutting and opened it- tried to understand how each organ functioned with the system. When confusion made us stuck, we called for some authors- dead and living- to lead this vague way...
Personally what attracted me was all the major obstacles while trying to reach for the Knowledge itself. Using Censorship as a fear mechanism, throughout the history all the authorities, local or federal , oppressed the people, slaughtered their books and libraries and condemned them to silence. They desired absolute obedience....
While reading The Library at Night by Manguel and The Trial by Kafka at the same time, I found traces of all those sabotaged roads to knowledge and let myself visualize the combination of these two different sources.
Silence became more and more concrete, shadows spread everywhere in my imagination. A world that is surrounded by the shadows of the censorship; ban-ning or a-ban-doning ... All the guilty pleasures of the censorship caged the "questions" in an unvoiced territory. So my work has become the depiction of this epidemic with some parts covered with overlapping of the same texts which made reading difficult by forming an illusion-like appearance. All the obstacles diseased, crippled and deaf-muted. Systems have created criminals looking for their crimes, the court is everywhere ,it casts its shadow on every space...
Görkem Ergün:
Class P and Guard of the Library:
if you want to act
you have to be;
chaotic and weird
unidentified
spooky
and here is library.
Act: SO, LETS ACTING IN THE LIBRARY!
...
Word on the road
Remains of the road
Wrong has the right
to be old
...
(For the performance: "as a scanner")
Body in the mind embodied mind law and justice - for the laws made with reason, an offer as an answer in case of not stepping out the duality of the mind and body completely: a territory between enact and act- the laws that are made in mind, processed in the body and then printed out, (body as a scanner) - it is processed in other minds-bodies- mind as a scanner-
Heads under the cloth, limbs remain uncovered- we went down under the table, the cloth covered our heads we were in semi-darkness, we lit our torches to be able to see the texts before us, there were texts of law, they were passed from hand to hand, it released what is kept by the silently reading memory, it screamed and shouted.
The typewriter on the table wrote the new ones when recording the revealed.
Laws are enacted and minds are acting the traces of memory, process always triggers others in the
other minds in the other bodies... PROCESS continues with losses, constantly changing new processes in other minds- movement and transformation -
Aslı Narin:
Another Library
In my cell, I came out with an idea of disposition of the images in the space that would generate a visual labyrinth. ** Following Borges - the library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which thus repeated would be an order: the Order - I placed myself as a voyeur in that eternal cycle and I formed a transparent tunnel with the photographs I took. The transparency of the images accompanies the infinity of the knowledge. I transformed myself into a hidden eye in the library. I developed my research around using transparent layers to give depth and eternity to an image or a sentence.
Emre Sağlam:
Sollicitare in the Library
When experiencing the proposals of Elaine Scarry considering dreaming by the book, the literary example she gives as a reference which I figured it would be as effective as The Trial by Kafka , I thought of this novel as a space I could act on. And I tried to catch the gestural movements. The references that were led by these movements opened in various texts and drew me into a different process of dreaming, these concussions and gestural approaches, my search in the library, basically occurred in two different acts. These two videos are interactive and simultaneous documentations of my research process relating to cinematic fictionalization. In the second video I directly tried to reach for the trial by getting at the center of all the map-like, imaginary and gestural approaches and I went exploring the reference acts in the trial. This attempt is an inner reply to the concussions in the first video.
Müjde Bayraktar/ Ayşenil Şenkul :
Cultivated Books
Our first research was about a modular book system, the results of this work required the library as a perception of architectural structure. In time we moved away from this idea and proceeded to an organic solution. When we turned our faces to the nature, we saw that to obtain knowledge, to wonder, to search, to reach for relative conclusions, to make new beginnings from these conclusions are processes that flow parallel to the natural cycle of life. As an expression of this cycle the plant has become a metaphor. The knowledge which spewed out of the books forms an organic relation with celluloid environment of book leaves by its nature. Old encyclopedias, categorized knowledges suddenly turn into a living- alive garden. The book reunites with the nature as a substance and serves a living, an organic system.
Orkun Aziz Aksoy :
Worldshelves
In this work, I took "the text" as the subject. I tried to demonstrate that the only thing which takes text and structure together is a library, based on the suggestion that a library resembles the structure of a piece of text which consists of letters, words and sentences whereas a library consists of letters, words, sentences, books and bookshelves.
My work consists of two different parts -as structure and text- which can be related to each other by interrogating text-structure connection. Instead of creating a new text, I chose the words from
fundamental rights and freedoms chapter in the constitution randomly, then as if constructing a building, i brought these words together in a form looks like poetry which is difficult to define if it is meaningful or not. A chapter in the Constitution is about prohibited books and this reminded me of bookshelves resembling cells which stand disconnected across each other.
As a structure this is a bookcase I built into my construction, by mounting box shelves which could contain a single book horizontally to the wall. as meant before, by changing its structure , this bookcase offers a reversal of the order of letter, word , sentence, text, book and bookcase.
The structural similarity between the structure and text is stressed by placing each boxshelf on the projection of a word of the text written on the wall in front. ...Liberties loyal to personalities / non to be divided to be removed / nobody's guiltier as the crimes other than deaths
Ceren Acun :
The Silence Epidemic
During our research, we almost made a surgery on the library- we laid it on the table, started cutting and opened it- tried to understand how each organ functioned with the system. When confusion made us stuck, we called for some authors- dead and living- to lead this vague way...
Personally what attracted me was all the major obstacles while trying to reach for the Knowledge itself. Using Censorship as a fear mechanism, throughout the history all the authorities, local or federal , oppressed the people, slaughtered their books and libraries and condemned them to silence. They desired absolute obedience....
While reading The Library at Night by Manguel and The Trial by Kafka at the same time, I found traces of all those sabotaged roads to knowledge and let myself visualize the combination of these two different sources.
Silence became more and more concrete, shadows spread everywhere in my imagination. A world that is surrounded by the shadows of the censorship; ban-ning or a-ban-doning ... All the guilty pleasures of the censorship caged the "questions" in an unvoiced territory. So my work has become the depiction of this epidemic with some parts covered with overlapping of the same texts which made reading difficult by forming an illusion-like appearance. All the obstacles diseased, crippled and deaf-muted. Systems have created criminals looking for their crimes, the court is everywhere ,it casts its shadow on every space...
Görkem Ergün:
Class P and Guard of the Library:
if you want to act
you have to be;
chaotic and weird
unidentified
spooky
and here is library.
Act: SO, LETS ACTING IN THE LIBRARY!
