S.T.ARGEM.

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S.T.ARGEM.(Street Collectors Research and Development Center), planned to be instituted at Pist from January 13 to March 1, it highlights that art –above all– is a form of relation and exists within a chain of social relations. Through transforming these relation forms, S.T.ARGEM. attempts to make a different existence model visible. In simplest terms, S.T.ARGEM. is an open-ended workshop where various productions will take place and alternative collaborative models will be tried through collaborations with street collectors. The first product of the collaboration we have developed with Katık, a periodical written and printed by the street collectors of Ankara, will be an ecological banner. Apart from this, we aim to continue our research and experiments through the participation of researchers, activists, artists, musicians and many others from different areas of activity.

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Political/ Artistic Context

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Each artistic form hosts a particular life edifice, a specific living model, and thus cannot be decomposed into art and politics. Through this project, we, the “artists,” are attempting to make visible the social and horizontal collaborative processes where collective subjectivity may arise. This work was born through efforts to reflect upon and develop models for a specific problem in its own right within the artistic and political literature: “the social function of the intellectual” and its connection to social struggles. It aims no more than the process of collaboration it wants to develop.

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For today’s social struggles, the art field presents an opening where differentiated collectivities may arise, various models of living may be proposed and discussed, and life-intervening subjectivities may take a fresh breath.

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We believe that horizontal collaborative processes to be developed within a country like Turkey, where art is commercialized within closed elite and narrow social relations, or abandoned to the shallow anti-political waters of popular culture once outside of these relations, may indeed make visible the possibility of an another world.