Sound of the Earth
December 2023 - November 2024
ÇANAKKALE
Sound of the Earth is a participatory performative ceramic placement project. The project aimed 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 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 was 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 turned into sound instruments. These clay forms were the most concrete output of the project.
A total of 12 workshops were be held with 36 women within the scope of the project, which was planned for a duration of 12 months from December 2023 to November 2024, in which various creative tools were implemented with expert participants in order to support women to express themselves freely. During voice workshops, musician and voice therapist Ceren Yeşilbaş invited 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 used painting tools in the process of visualizing the emotions that participants want to express. In clay workshops, performance and ceramic artist Betül Katıgöz planed a workshop flow that supported 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 continued for a period of 3 months and were followed by processing of the workshop outcomes. Simultaneously, a ceramic instrument production workshop took place. After a total production process of 5 months, a performance piece was produced from clay and placed with a performance.
The project was completed in November 2024 and the public performance during the project finale was carried out with local women and recorded.
