With whom: Design Atalier Kadıköy
When: 2018
We organized the Fictions Site workshops on 6 and 20 October 2018 in partnership with Design Atelier Kadıköy. In this workshop series, we aimed to transform the textures of Kadıköy into patterns and to produce drawings by experiencing the existing spaces in order to trace the living environment. We aimed to visualize and explore the city in a research, sensory and experimental work atmosphere. Workshops carried out within the scope of the workshops program of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial were realized with the support of Edding.
In the preparatory meetings held before the workshops, we worked on both the content of the workshop and the materials to be used. We considered the possibility of constructing collages and drawings as tools to rethink the city in terms of content, and decided to make productions through photo collages for the first workshop and for the second with copying the map drawings. For the materials to be used during the workshops, the capacities of paper, plastic, metal, ceramic and fabric pencils sent by Edding, the workshop supporter, for the purpose of testing were discovered and we determined the techniques and application surfaces that would provide the best results in practice.
The first workshop, which was held in Design Atelier Kadıköy on 6 October, aimed to rethink and produce the formation and life processes of the textures encountered on the street scale in the city. Initially, after a section discussing the content of the workshop, we distributed photographs of the building facades from the Kadıköy Yeldeğirmeni Neighbourhood to the participants. We asked the participants to construct a story to trace the buildings and the lifes in them through these photographs. Collective stories were created for each photograph by forwarding the photograph and the paper in which the story was written to the next person in turn. These stories became the basis for participants to construct their own stories and textures. In the continuation of the workshop, everyone took the photographs on the table and produced their own collages of textures on acetate papers with copy technique. After the last part of the talk sessions, where the participants explained their productions and comments were made, we put the acetates on the boards for exhibition until the next workshop. The first workshop, which was attended by 20 participants, created an ideas base for the second workshop with its products that emerged from understanding and transforming the city on a street scale.
The second leg of the Fiction Site workshop was on October 20 again at Design Atelier Kadıköy. This workshop aimed to evaluate and reconstruct the areas in terms of relations, boundaries and transitions by looking at the city from the upper scale. Before the workshop, we distributed small-scale outputs of Kadıköy’s current maps to the tables and laid down a large-scale map on the ground. At the beginning of the workshop we had a discussion with the participants on the development of the city on the textures read from these maps. Afterwards, the participants copied the urban texture samples from the maps to the acetates as in the first workshop. This copying and assembling section was a preparition phase for the second part of the workshop, which was to draw on different materials. In the second part, drawings transferred to surfaces such as transparent plexi, white ceramics, American cloth, steel plate with Edding pencils specialized for these surfaces were the productions in which participants interpreted the representations of urban texture and conveyed their ideas on how to reconstruct the urban texture. The productions in the workshop, where 10 participants took part, were placed on the mobile urban transformation office vehicle, which we had previously done for the Mobile Bureau project, to be exhibited.
Fiction Site workshops allowed us to rethink the city through drawing and to experience pencils operating on different surfaces. As Herkes İçin Mimarlık and Design Atelier Kadıköy, we thank to 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Edding and participants for enabling these workshops to happen.
Here you can find the photo album of the workshop.
Workshop coordinators: Ceren Bek, Emre Gündoğdu, İdil Bayar, Merve Gül Özokcu
