Studio Bosporus Graphic

Studio
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Studio Bosporus

Interview with İlker Çatak

Where are we what? Changing Perspectives on Belonging, Identity and Home
 
Video Interviews with selected alumni in the context of the festival “Studio Bosporus – 10 years of Tarabya Cultural Academy”
 

A project by Gülriz Eğilmez and Alexandra Weltz-Rombach
 
“The notion that identity has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call them
selves the same, is nonsense. As a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.” (Stuart Hall 1994).
 
The recruitment agreement between Germany and Turkey will be 60 years old in 2021, and the artists residence Kulturakademie Tarabya will celebrate its tenth anniversary. Over the last 60 years, Germany has become a country of immigration, not least due to the permanent influx of Turkish migrant workers and their families, who are already living in Germany in the fourth generation and are shaping German society.
 
Since the establishment of the Tarabya Cultural Academy, another wave of migration from Turkey to Germany has been set in motion. Whereas previously immigrants were working primarily in the low-wage sector, the majority of this brain drain are now Turkish academics, artists and journalists who have been exposed to increased political pressure in Turkey since the Gezi protests and the attempted coup in 2016 and are migrating abroad. In this field of tension, the artist residency on the Bosporus offers international artists who have their center of life in Germany the unique opportunity to live in Istanbul for a period of four to eight months and to change their perspective on Turkey as a country, turkish society, and the established German-Turkish relations as an expression of social diversity.
 
Change of perspective, enternal attribution and self-perception
 
From Almanya to Türkiye: to live in Turkey perhaps for the first time, acknowledging one’s own resentments, identity questions, homeland understanding, self-location and – perception. Which foreign attributions have the children and grandchildren of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants encountered in the homeland of their parents, which ones possibly Germans, and how did they deal with them?
 
The video interviews focus on the personal perspectives of the former scholarship holders of the Tarabya Cultural Academy. How did they perceive Turkey socially, politically and culturally? How did the stay influence them, personally as well as artistically? What lasting impressions and connections did they take away from the residency, and how does the Tarabya residency differ from other residency programs?
 
In the video interviews, the alumni give a very personal insight into their time in Istanbul. They talk about their experiences of life in Turkey, their impressions of society, culture and politics, how many homes they have and how media representation of BPOC can be made more inclusive in Germany, which now sees itself as an immigration country.