The exhibition contained multiple medias which helped us discover Istanbul, and more especially the district of Kadikoy under multiple aspects.
For this we worked with analog photography with the Italian photographer Ottavio Sellitti.
The exchange title is « Rethinking, Cooperating, Sharing » and all along the 3 previous phases we worked on 1) Building a good and functioning group dynamic, 2) Thinking the concept of interculturality and also about thinking and solving conflicts ; 3) The concepts of history and remembrance and put all of this themes into application into a practical, sociological and artistic project. One of the main goal of this artistic project was to interview people in Germany who all had a migration background (from each countries represented in this exchange) and present their stories. Out of these biographies, we wanted to show that no matter where you come from, which national background and international conflicts you may carry with you, the experience of migration (its reasons, motivations, acculturation processes etc.) can be the same for every one and in that extend that human experiences are shared even by keeping their unicity. This work was meant to enable participants to learn more about « micro history », taking distance from national history narratives and provide a message of reconciliation by putting individual histories all together.
With this method you can make an epistemological parallel of what is (historical) knowledge, how it develops along time and efforts that are necessary to catch parts of the reality. This is what we did with the people we interviewed, out of their reality we reproduced a patchwork history mosaic which fits in the universal history flow.
For the phase in Istanbul a group of participants went through the district of Kadikoy in order to make “street photography” with the same method and camera as in Berlin. This time the focus was on space. The idea was to find places in the city where the appearance of the space: architecture, buildings, street furniture, shops urban testifies of the mixture of historical ages and cultures. The street, the setting of buildings, their architectural styles give us a lot of informations about history and its different “layers”. These testimonies are everywhere but often un-noticed because they are too common, or because we are not aware of their particularities or we don’t focus on them. The activity enabled participants to pay attention to this and also think in term of photography: what can be shown on the photograph and what not? What is the best distance? The best framing etc.? Our goal was to make as much photographs as possible and develop them in Istanbul.
Parallel to this activity other groups went and gather “city sounds” in order to create a “sound mapping” of Kadikoy/Istanbul. During a tour in the district they collected as many and various sounds as they can. Out of all these samples they edited a soundtrack, by putting the sound randomly one after another and loop it. The sense of this activity is to create a sound atmosphere for the exhibition of the photographs that is played continuously during the time of the exhibition. They also added (random) parts of the recorded interviews of the people we met in Berlin directly in this soundtrack so that voices (in different languages) and sound from the city alternate/mix together and create the link between both series of photographs.