Less Healing Plants

December 2023 - November 2024
MUĞLA, ISTANBUL

Weeds or herbaceous plants are seldom seen in the relationship that man establishes with nature, especially in urban life. The primary goal of the Less Healing Plants project is to transfer the geographies where two female artists live in, one being urban and the other being countryside, to each other by means of wild plants - or in other words, “less healing plants” - through visual, auditory, literary and spatial representations, and to establish a playful dialogue that explores ways to approach the distant through different means.

With one artist having stayed in Istanbul and the other having moved to Gümüşlük, the project covers the methods used in the recording of the wild endemic plants of both regions throughout history, as well as their meanings in collective memory, and aims to support both artistic and narrative discovery/creation and dialogue. In addition, it attaches importance to diversity and pluralism in social participation with solutions such as portraying accessibility in visual arts, transferring visual art to auditory art with the use of ambient sounds, and offering multi-sensory experiences, which are all rare examples in Turkey.

When the project is finalized, it aims to create an online directory-library where interspace sounds and images are matched, which will allow for a borderless and open-access experience as part of art for everyone, without physical space restrictions.

While Less Healing Plants opens up a space to establish a new “dialogue” with migration by establishing a new “dialogue” with comrade species, it also aims to contribute to the analysis of relations between various species in different geographies, and raise awareness on and increase artistic creations made at the intersection of human, nature and art by joining artistic practices built around the city and the environment.

Hatiye Garip

Hatiye is a disabled illustrator, comic book artist and designer living in Istanbul. She graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University Visual Communication Design Department in 2015. She completed her master's degree in Design, Technology and Society at Özyeğin University with her thesis study examining the representations of disability in illustrated children's books. She likes to draw birds, flowers and ordinary moments. She experiments on accessible illustration, comics, graphic medicine, experimenting with reflection sounds and field recordings. Recently, she has been running the “Accessible Lines” project, bringing together illustrators from the UK and Turkey.

İpek Kay

İpek is an interior architect, designer and illustrator who lives in Gümüşlük. In 2021, she completed her doctoral thesis in the ITU Architectural Design Informatics Program, where she developed a theoretical and applicable framework for the use of digital tools to support children’s spatial experiences. At MonnoM, which she is a founder of, she designs environments and organizes workshops where children can simultaneously use physical and digital media that support their sensory experiences and co-production. She designs playgrounds with initiatives focusing on children's spatial rights, and she illustrates children’s books . Her drawings are accompanied by plants, clouds and imaginary nature landscapes that she is interested in.

Connections:

https://hatiyegarip.com/

https://ipekkay.com/

https://playmonnom.com/

https://www.accessiblelines.com/

This page is published on 8 December 2023.