Bell: Scenes from a Coming School (in collaboration with Galatasaray High School Theater Group), 2018

​

Bell: Scenes from a Coming School is a series of performances, games and tasks realized during the day in a school. It calls out school, based on a carrot-and-stick mechanism, by the school bell, which slices the flow of time into chunks and organizes how the student should spend it. Yet, this time students misunderstand the command of the bell. Rather than going in or out of class, they play games or carry out some actions all the way; the game/task/performance somehow reaches an end as per its own rhythm. "Productivity", "output" and "success" as they are defined in the education discourse of our day are notions that are most foreign to this particular curriculum that is mainly based on games proposed by Augusto Boal.

 

The games/tasks/performances focus not on transferring information but on the experience. Slowness ​​instead of speed, solidarity instead of competition, subjective time instead of objective time, emptiness instead of fullness, and immediate experience of life instead of transfer of information are investigated. For a day, the school opens to other modes of time, rhythms and possibilities. 

​

The video is compiled from the shootings of the performances/tasks/games while they were unfolding. And the drum sound that cuts the time of the specific performance/task/game is the actual bell of the school.