Sound of the Earth
December 2023 - November 2024
ÇANAKKALE
Sound of the Earth is a participatory performative ceramic placement project. The project aims to organize workshops with women with children, a segment most affected by the phenomenon of loneliness in rural Çanakkale, and to process workshop outcomes into a piece of artwork that bears traces of collective mind.
Through art workshops to be held with women who simultaneously carry out agricultural production, housework and maternity and have to postpone their awareness of their own body and needs, a journey is aimed where the target audience discovers what they want to say. In the project, the earthenware containers at the center of the creation process symbolize the woman, while also depicting fragility with their thin walls and the balance they find on a tiny base, and strength with the cooking process they undergo at thousands of degrees to turn into ceramic. Whereas in the focus of the sense, these ceramic vessels representing women will turn into sound instruments. These clay forms will be the most concrete output of the project.
A total of 12 workshops will be held with 36 women within the scope of the project, which is planned for a duration of 12 months from December 2023 to November 2024, in which various creative tools will be implemented with expert participants in order to support women to express themselves freely. During voice workshops, musician and voice therapist Ceren Yeşilbaş will invite women to meet their own voices and the power thereof through games and various activities based on the healing and pleasure of hearing our own voices and the voices of others.
In painting workshops, painter Derin Uludağ plans to use painting tools in the process of visualizing the emotions that participants want to express.
In clay workshops, performance and ceramic artist Betül Katıgöz plans a workshop flow that will support women’s well-being, receive support from movement, body and sound practices to connect them with their own needs and then transform this bond into clay forms.
These workshops will continue for a period of 3 months and will be followed by processing of the workshop outcomes. Simultaneously, a ceramic instrument production workshop will take place. After a total production process of 5 months, a performance piece will be produced from clay and the placement will be created at the area where the performance will take place.
The project is planned to be completed in November 2024 and the public performance during the project finale will be carried out with local women and recorded.