Culture: Whose? How? With what? Workshop
29, 30 January, 5 February 2022
CLICK TO WATCH THE VIDEOS OF THE SESSIONS
(available in Turkish only)
CultureCIVIC, a European Union project, started its online workshops where it will provide trainings to support artists, culture and art initiatives and civil society operators from different regions of Turkey. The 12 workshops, which form the backbone of the CultureCIVIC: Capacity Building Programme, will be held throughout 2022 and 2023. The workshops aim to create the pivotal ground for cooperation and dialogue among the participants, carrying out studies that improve the skills of the participants in cultural management and civic participation. Individuals who design and manage culture-art-based projects in public or non-governmental organisations, culture-art institutions, universities or independently can apply to the workshops, which are organised by CultureCIVIC's executive partners, Goethe-Institut Istanbul, Anadolu Kültür and Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).
The online workshops to be held within the scope of CultureCIVIC: Capacity Building Programme start with a workshop series organised by Anadolu Kültür. The workshop series, which consists of three separate programs, will take place in the months of January, March and May in 2022. The workshops will include seminal speeches and presentations on important issues that need to be deepened in the fields of culture, arts and civil society in Turkey. The design of the workshop series, which covers the subjects that need to be developed about each stage of a project such as determination of a target group, activity, approach, and method, is based on a methodology that takes into account the urgency and resource constraints, suggesting the use of routes that includes multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multi-identity, diversity and plurality. Active participation, which would enable the participants to transfer the experience and knowledge they bring from their own fields, would be the most fundamental factor determining the conduct of the workshops.
Culture: Whose? How? With what? Workshop
The first workshop, took place online on 29, 30 January between 10:00-15:00 and on 5 February 2022 between 10.00-17.30, focused on questions of “For whom, how and with what does culture work?”. The workshop, is designed in collaboration with academician and researcher Ayça İnce, aimed to expand and strengthen the participants by opening up to discussion today’s socio-cultural field, which is stuck between the definitions of dominant culture and the question of “Whose culture?”, on the axis of the experiences and issues brought by the representatives of culture, arts and civil society, who are the main actors of this field.
Within the scope of the workshop, Ayfer Bartu Candan from Boğaziçi University delivered a speech explaining the changing definitions of “culture” with examples, and Levent Soysal from Kadir Has University, focused on the different uses of culture in the globalising world today through the questions of “What will culture do in 2022, what will it do for us?”. The programme also included the presentation of Matbakh|Kitchen Workshop that has been organised with women in Gaziantep by architect and researcher Merve Bedir, and also the participatory sessions facilitated by Aylin Vartanyan, who works in the fields of expressive arts and social transformation, discussing the relationship of culture with society and the individual through the concepts of belonging, ownership and hospitality.