Pontoporos: Kültürhane as Film, 2019

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In the video installation Pontoporos (2019) I have produced an artistic documentary of Kültürhane, a book-café established by Academics for Peace in order to survive after being expelled from their jobs and deprived of many civil rights. Despite its legal, economic and physical disadvantages, Kültürhane is a place where a resilient sociality has become a learning/thinking environment. I recorded daily work rhythms and in the film juxtaposed them with words that became active in a space of solidarity and sociality. Thus, through a diminished film aesthetic and feeling of a slowed down time, I searched for an articulation of resistance while focusing on the possible relations between work rhythms and gestures, physical and banal reality of objects, elusive utterances, the scenery of horizon and sound of sea waves. What is the relation between the exceptional state of Kültürhane and the official and actual state of exception/emergency declared by the authorities and the condition of "civil death" that is said that the Academics for Peace are exposed to and the life that we see unfolding in Kültürhane? The film does not answer but attempts to ask these questions.

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*The installation shots are from And That Song is Our Amulet exhibition in Galerie Wedding that took place in emergency conditions during the summer of 2020. Due to the Covid-19 crisis the Wedding administration decided to turn the gallery to a Social Service Office where disadvantaged people receive some support. However, they were receiving it in a thoroughly policed setting that reminds a "makeshift frontline". There were many contradictions between this thoroughly policed office environment, its protocols and my work Pontoporos. In my installation I used the same office furniture to mimic this makeshift office and tried to point to a more horizontal and welcoming option.