Whatabout Studio will conduct a collective student biennial entitled “Innocence, Privacy and Embarrassment” in 8 cities in Turkey in 2015-2016 Fall term.
The team announced that getting to know meetings will be organized in 8 different cities October 2-9 to discuss all these developments and to give a kick start to the project.
The invitation text for Whatabout Turkey familiarity meetings says:
What is Whatabout?
Whatabout is a collective design practices series and open studio functioning without interruption, focused on experimental production and the experimental process, searching/testing alternative education styles based on not transfer but sharing.
With 18 projects and Turkey tour we performed during the last two and a half years, we reached more than 400 participants and right away started to do what we can to become a Turkey team. With the participation of Whatabout teams in Istanbul, Izmir, Eskişehir, Ankara, Mardin, Bursa, Adana and Bolu;
To create together the Whatabout Studio we call new pirot/collective educational processes / [informal/open studio] advancing in parallel with the Academy, we will conduct at MEF University during the present fall term and the Collective Student Biennial entitled “Innocence, Privacy, Embarrassment”, our 20th project we will conduct approximately during the next one year, we expect you, student friends to participate in the familiarization meetings we organized all over Turkey!
At the meetings to be held in 8 cities, we will discuss the content/program of Whatabout Studio we will give a kickstart at MEF University Tuesday October 6, the collective student biennial we call “Innocence, Privacy, Embarrassment” and Whatabout TV which will start in October to chat with the “unknown” workers, winners, losers, toilers and abandoners of the marketplace and we hope that we will get to know you, student friends to keep on going with a greater population!
Why a collective student biennial? Why “Innocence, Privacy, Embarrassment”?
We don’t want a largish group of “We don’t want it!”ers daring to get dirty, running away leaving the prestigious arms of high art will say with those easiest to access far away from the city beside inaccessible production at city cores. Gathering of a few artistic things at the red dot place which can only draw the wrath of the village muhtar at a shallowness not to draw the attention of high art enthusiast people to recognize the existence of the culture network created behind high prestige walls by art communities, artists and curators locally and internationally to be installed right beside it.
The biennial of not the curators chosen by international advisory boards but of those waiting at the door ranging from people who think“I will write it in my cv”, to I’ll make a little bit of money out of the subsets fixed based on ÖSYM’s scoring system.
The words of us who feel uneasy at “neighborhood pressured art days”, some of us can’t bother to go downtown or which some of us come to attempt for one day covering great distance from any town of Anatolia, of those who say ‘I guess these people understand something but I’m ignorant.
We expect you to think about the building blocks of country – Innocence, Privacy, Embarrassment –
Not to speak at the gala cocktails in world metropolises, city cores or prestigious venues but to create the collective student biennial of the country where there is buttered grilled bread on the stove and to create together with the artists, curators and all other toilers of national/international biennials and also the kids who will meet us on the road when playing ball in the village they live in.
We students, too, have things to say.
We will say what we will say maybe in a torn down village home at any place in Anatolia, maybe at the marketplace of a town. Until now, we took on the role of the audience in biennials but this time, we’re starting working to create our own biennial ‘altogether’.
Therefore, let’s pick up those who wish to create Innocence, Privacy, Embarrassment out of you, student friends all over Turkey during the next fall period. Indeed, we know that these kids are still young and of course, you too did such stupid things when you were young”.
Finally, Whatabout will be practiced by several participants with different majorities from 7 cities in this semester. While the student biennial studies are progressed, the pop-up style ateliers that are specified by participants are kept going in the Whatabout Studio at MEF University which is the meeting point of Istanbul participants, once in a week. In addition, as their most powerful motivation is the periodical meetings in different cities, because we considered that connection between “whatabouters” in variable cities is more effective with face to face interaction. Anyone who wants to participate should continue to follow Whatabout Studio and catch their local and intercity meetings.
