ILGIN SEYMEN

Re-Locate Project / Experimental Workshop & Exhibition 

Re-Locate Project proposes an experimental workshop practice that is based on mobility and translocation. The suggested mobility tries to encompass the physical transitivity of the cities and borders, as well as the flexibility of historical, identitarian, and ideological borders. 

The theoretical framework of the Re-Locate project is based on the population exchange between Anatolia and the Balkans and it focuses on the flexibility of the borders, cultural similarities, controversies, the lack of communication between cultures, as well as various methods of developing new communication models. The shared history within the regions; Plovdiv - Bulgaria, Athens - Greece, Skopje - Macedonia and Prishtina - Kosovo, provides a basis to establish a mutual platform to research both about common history and develop a cultural understanding on various levels.

Re-Locate project consists of a series of workshops that are realized in this framework. The first part of the series is realized in Plovidiv, Athens, Skopje, Prizren, and Pristine with the participation of Gökçe Süvari, Ha za vu zu (Özgür Erkök, Güneş Terkol), Ilgın Seymen, Mehmet Dere, Suat Öğüt, and Zeyno Pekünlü. The group worked in collaboration with the local artists in the places that they visited. They worked on both their individual works and collective works and shared their experiences with each other. The second workshop is realized in Istanbul with the participation of the artists who were invited to Istanbul from the places that are visited: Alban Muja, Gjorgje Jovanovik, Mary Zygoury, and Raycho Stanev.

Action & Interaction

Throughout the whole journey I collected images from various sources that are open to public and build up a mind-map of the cities' cultural landscapes. As a reciprocal act, I added small marks -cut out images- on already layered surface of the streets. Meanwhile, I removed posters of cultural and social events from the streets of one country and hung them on the walls of another country. This seemingly trivial gesture turned out to be a problematic act when caught by the attention of citizens.  

On the streets of Skopje, for example, even the World Wildlife Fund's poster with a panda illustration, offends local Macedonians because it was in Greek. This reaction that I created through my act, turns out to be a valuable chance for an ambivalent conversation between two or more random people, stranger to each other, measuring their values. 

When misplaced, a simple cultural image works as a trigger for posing other cultural aspects in the definition of the identity of the local and the visitor who could be either a foreigner or a stranger. Comparisons of all sorts, function for mutual understanding of the shared and the unfamiliar.  Lying below all confrontation, I guess, there is some curiosity for how foreign we are.  How foreign can we be? In a good-hearted manner, such interactions in everyday practice are exemplars of willingness or unwillingness for communication with others who might carry hurtful stimuli coming from historical, social or cultural reasons.  

Most of the posters were taken down by locals in just over a night and some were covered with other political campaign posters.

Mnemonics

As the residue of a genuine and intense encounters, Mnemonics is the final outcome of Re-Locate Project that took place in the Balkans region through out a 20-day-journey. The installation with cut out images from photographs taken during the project, spreads out in the whole exhibition space while getting denser in a luminous corner.

Mnemonics - Postcards

In 2012, 70 unique postcards produced from exhibition images of Mnemonics, were sent to ITS-Z1 in Belgrade, as free take aways at the exhibition "In Growing up Amid the Historical Mysteries of Proximity: Pros & Cons of Being Neighbors". Residues of Plovdiv, Athens, Scopje, Prizren and Prishtina were then started to spread out to who-knows-where from Belgrade.