Update / İstanbul Soundscape Project

Around this time last year, when I was graduating from Art in Context with @istanbulsoundscape . Starting in Tarlabaşı in 2018, ISP held six open calls between 2018 and 2023, bringing together nearly 40 artists for around ten events. In the beginning, the project became the voice of Tarlabaşı, a neighborhood that was disappearing under urban transformation. Then, when Haydarpaşa Railway Station was abandoned to its fate by the wrong policies of the government, it created a platform for sound artists to present the special acoustic ecology of Haydarpaşa station with different open calls and events.
During the 2018 presidential elections, when we lost 100 years of parliamentary democracy in Turkey, ISP responded by inviting the city’s sound artists to the subterranean caverns of Istanbul. This open call aimed to combine the solidarity voices using the acoustic properties of the “underground”, inspired by the anti-system communities that struggle against dystopian power on the “surface” in science fiction narratives. The darkest open call for the darkest times..

As a result of those elections, I decided to move to Berlin, but I visited Istanbul many times for ISP, it helped me to keep the connection with my hometown. After focusing on the biophonic and geophonic sounds of Istanbul with two concerts “Nature in the City” and “Two Sides Marmara”, it became my graduation project at @ifkik.udk which is aimed at artists who see their creative production within a social context and wish to develop and realize artistic concepts, strategies and working methods relating to this context. I like the way that the project found its own best path organically, by putting me into the most fitting program, and then helping me to finish it. I wouldn’t find a better environment for this.
Thank you, @istanbulsoundscape , my @ifkik.udk friends, all my lecturers, professors and my advisor Jörg Heiser for the support. And thanks to all the brave and talented sound artists who came together for Istanbul.