oda projesi

November 12-19 2006

Workshop with Don Milani primary school, 5th class, Pisa, Italy.The workshop “Untitled Neighbourhood” was about searching for a different level of landscape of a place one belongs to, as a way of seeing it differently than it is supposed to be lived in. The people go and come in between places (schools, subways, shopping malls, restaurants, offices etc) everyday and these are ready-made spaces offered to the city inhabitants. But what happens when you try to read the micro relationships happening by coincidence, stories that make the place, pedestrian narratives that moves, rumours that creates different images of the one and the same place. How to resist to the given position by the macro politics that try to get an overcontrol by plannings and strict maps and ignoring the everyday needs/movement/possibilities of a person living in a very well planned city.
The starting point for the action was, Franco Moretti’s map analysis on Mary Mitford’s novel Our Village, in his book called Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Mary Mitford’s novel starts with these words: “And a small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose; a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen, and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from B—- to S—-, which passed through about ten days ago, and will I suppose return some time or other. There are coaches of all varieties nowadays; perhaps this may be intended for a monthly diligence, or a fortnight fly. Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up the hill.”
Moretti is making his own map of the novel, kind of a scheme visualizing the village. He’s searching for what the literary maps are for: “There is a very simple question, about literary maps: what exactly do they do? What do they do that cannot be done with words, that is; because, if it can be done with words, then maps are superfluous.” According to Moretti’s map, Mitford’s 24 stories develop in a solar system and the narrative space is not linear but cyclic. So the writer creates a possibility for the reader to look at the world through an uncatchable village’s central point of view and reversing the history. The village becomes the center of the city/country/world and one can say that Istanbul where Oda Projesi acts, is a city where you have different centers, it is not about planning but every each quarter has different characteristics so there is not just one center but centers. Inventing maps is a way of playing with the centers dictated to the city inhabitants.
Oda Projesi wanted to start a process for a similar kind of experience, starting from writing our own stories related to a place and trying to build these different places up, considering each children’s story as a model of their own perception of daily life.
From Oda Projesi side, it would be a way of getting in relation with this different place, to deal with the artist’s situation as traveller. The artists are often displaced to work in different contexts and they are face to face with their own alienation, but as a first step it is important to try to “catch” the image of the place. Does the artist travel from one city to the other, or from one institution to the other?

The workshop with the kids consisted of three phases:
1) There were a class of kids living in the same neighbourhood writing stories (fake stories like real ones) on their quarter, trying to open up the different possibilities of a place from their point of view. Before we start, they guided us around and told about the real stories, gossips on the place. So we could get ten different images of the same place and had ten different neighbourhoods out of one.
2) We wrote stories all together, discussing on some clues/questions/keywords to orient the stories. The keyquestions were like:
-How was the weather?
-How many people are in the story?
-How was the light?
-Which place is the center of the story (alternative to the neighbourhood’s center on the real map)
- How many places are included in the story?
- Where is the author’s physical position in the story? etc…
3) Through these narratives they draw their stories maps and could create a new model of their quarter by building collectively one big maquette.

See: Narratives
Participation to “Cities From Below” exhibition invited by Teseco Foundation