“It’s not solidarity, it’s necessity” - A conversation with Aslı Özdoyuran

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, it is my great pleasure to welcome Aslı Özdoyuran. Aslı is an artist and researcher living and working in Istanbul. Along her artistic research and practice Aslı is running BAS, a non-profit space in Istanbul initiated by Banu Cennetoğlu and dedicated to the collection, display, production and distribution of artist books. She's also a facilitator of Omuz, a solidarity network in the field of art and culture established in order to respond to the economic precarities and inequalities which became acutely visible during the pandemic. Aslı is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement V with a collective research focus on modes of governance through the lens of self-organization. In this conversation, we will talk about self-organization and artistic practices in relation to mutual aid and solidarity initiatives. Aslı, welcome to Pali-Room!

Hello, Myrto! Thank you for the introduction.

Aslı, you studied Sculpture as well as Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) in Chicago and after that you worked closely with other artists as their assistant, while also co-running your own projects and developing your individual practice. Most recently, you also got actively involved with Omuz, a solidarity grassroots mutual aid initiative that was established during the pandemic. I'm curious to know where does your individual artistic practice stand in relation to your engagement with your collective work?

As much as I know that they're inseparable, I don't like to speak of my artistic work as an encapsulating meta subject that involves the social work I do in the field, because then the field work, which involves the physical and mental labor of many others, becomes a tool to talk about an artistic practice. The two artists that I've worked for or with so far, which are Michael Rakowitz during my time as an undergraduate in Chicago and Banu Cennetoğlu, currently and seems like longer, are good examples as their artistic practice is inseparable from their role as activists, organizers or simply responsible citizens. In that way, I don't think that any work that I make can be detached from the social context or the ways I structure my relationships with the institutions I work with. How did I start engaging with self-organization? We started in Chicago. In the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago we started a space that kept changing its name. That's why I don't find it very important to mention the name. It was a space where a lot of movement-based work was being shown and a space that we also used as a studio. Some of us lived there. It was a space that you could use on a daily basis, going in and out. There would always be someone there and I think that was the first introduction to an artist-run space for me or my role in an artist-run space in Chicago and self-organization.

I'm glad that you mentioned this fact about the name that kept changing, because that also shows how artists initiatives and artist-run spaces are spaces that constantly transform and become, while we are becoming with them at the same time. They are places that are transitory and that accommodate the respective needs every time. From our discussions over the past weeks, it's been very interesting to observe how many things we share within our artistic communities in Athens and Istanbul, although we operate within quite different social and political circumstances. I'm thinking that to self-organize is always a way of creating the conditions of your own survival. We have talked a lot about the challenges that we face and the precariousness of this way of working and I keep asking myself, why do we keep doing that to ourselves and I want to hear from you, why self-organization?

It was inspiring to hear about the union forming here because there is no art union in Turkey and there has never been one. Thinking about alternatives, maybe this is a good moment to start talking about Omuz. The turkish word Omuz, which literally translates to "shoulder" in English, is associated with several metaphors that carry a strong sense of togetherness 'omuz vermek' and 'omuzlamak', meaning to support and to back up; 'omuz omuza' and 'omuzdaşlık', to be in solidarity; 'omuzunda taşımak', to show respect; 'omuzunda ağlamak', to cry on one's shoulder, and so on. As you said, Omuz is a solidarity network initiated by a group of people working in the arts and culture who believe in the urgency of unreciprocated resource sharing and cooperation, which will only be sustainable through the support of others. Omuz is a sharing network among those working and producing in the arts, bringing together those who want to receive financial support with those who want to give support. We do work in different political and social circumstances, but in some ways, self-organization works as a patchwork for things. In our case, it was the state which allocated no money for artists or art workers in Turkey during the pandemic and we had to figure out a way to make up for that. Of course, Omuz understands that it's not an everlasting solution and that it can bring an end to the problems that we are facing and that it can only be a patchwork, as I said, to the lack of state support. In one of the talks we organized as the Omuz dictionary, which I'm going to talk about later on, one of our guest speakers, Hacer Foggo, who is the founder of the Deep Poverty Network - a solidarity and research network that endeavors to make visible and sustainable conditions imposed by deep poverty and to initiate debate on poverty as a human rights violation-, said "it's not solidarity, it's necessity", which was so powerful and jarring to hear. Of course, she was talking about deep poverty in Turkey, which is very different than what we are doing with Omuz, but it is something to think about -this idea of not solidarity, but necessity, that this idea of self-organization comes from necessity instead of solidarity. My question would be: when does self-organization become a necessity? And, to answer your’s, yes, to self-organize is to create the conditions of your own survival, although I also hesitate to use the word survival because it can mean different things for many people. When Hacer Foggo talks about survival, it's different than when we talk about survival in the arts.

I'm glad that you make this distinction, because we always need to be mindful of the words that we're using and that's something that you're doing with the dictionary that you will tell us about later on.

Yeah, it comes with a responsibility towards your community, the work that you're doing and also the way you prefer to talk about them. This is similar to the way I answered your first question, where I don't want to talk about it through an artistic practice, because as much as they're inseparable this is something that involves others' labors and this is a platform of exchange.

Since you mentioned the exchange part, I would like to go back to The School of Infinite Rehearsals, which is a multidisciplinary research group. I think that it's very important to recognize where each one of you came from and what each of you brought to the group. I'm thinking that collective organizing takes a lot of energy and time and that you have been actively involved with Omuz for over a year now and practicing things on the grounds. I'm wondering what prompted you to apply for another collective endeavour like the School?

The School of Infinite Rehearsals proposed time and money to think about self-organization —or collective governance in Harry's terms. I was curious to see different models of governance under different regimes and how we have different responses based on the needs, the circumstances and what we have access to. Sometimes when you are working closely on something, in my case Omuz, you don't see the larger issues and it becomes dull, the repetitive work that you are doing for it. I thought this was a good moment to zoom out and share this time with people who are also engaged in self-organization in different places. In my application, I quoted Kayla Anderson, who asked "how do we live despite trauma, disaster, intentional media destruction and political paralysis?", which quite interestingly was asked before the pandemic. This was a question to have in mind during our collective research here, because we arrived to Greece at a time when places started opening up again and people started to socialize again. It's a bizarre time to share so much time with a group of people, especially after spending a year and a half in isolation, repeating to ourselves to keep the distance. In that way it was interesting and I do think the idea of collective research as a social experiment is becoming more and more common as the culture of individualism ironically makes it more appealing to be part of a shared environment within a bracket of time. This time bracket of attention and engagement is more needed now than ever. Firstly, due to the massive isolation caused by the pandemic, as I said, and secondly -I'm reflecting some of Kayla's thoughts here-, because of the prolonged exposure to capitalism, individualism and social media. As we are collectively coping with the fear of contagion, it is important to remind ourselves the importance of proximity, collectivizing and mobilizing, as well as listening and searching for novel ways of contemplation. A question I initially asked was: "How do we keep proximity, while distances are socially manipulated?" In that way, the time that we spent here in The School of Infinite Rehearsals was very interesting. It was a social experiment between us and how we engaged with the outside. Maybe it's not so good to make such a separation between the inside and the outside of the residency, as we spent most of our time out in the streets of Athens. Retrospectively, I think our time at Onassis AiR provided opportunities to momentarily enact different forms of economy and exchange, which is always a good practice to go back home with.

I also remember your collective reading on care. All the relations that you managed to build couldn't have been built without care. Thinking and knowing together requires care. That's something that I was reading recently and it reflected a lot the way that you worked together. What was your individual research path, the one that you wanted to focus on, and how did you see that relating to the collective research that you did as a group?

When I applied, I chose to think about compromise, because I was reflecting on the self-organized structures trying to keep alive in Turkey during the pandemic. Many of those structures did not make it today or had to give up on the idea of having a physical space, including Poşe, Torun, and so on. I was curious to look at compromise more through a critical lens than a strategy for survival. But I guess they became inseparable. How do these structures compromise from their initial ideas, whether this is a political compromise or methods to keep funding the space? When I brought up this idea to the group here, it opened an interesting conversation, because Joey used the term compromise as a method towards collective decision making, which was a positive thing -to give up part of the demand in order to work towards consensus. Paz challenged this proposal by saying that the idea of compromise comes from religious teaching and used marriage as an example for compromised relationships. It was interesting where this topic led us to and when we visited spaces we heard about the decisions made to make it past the pandemic. For instance, Khora, the social kitchen in Kypseli offering food support for refugees in Athens —where Nuno from our group is one of the founding members and we are going to be cooking for tomorrow— faced a serious challenge, because a social kitchen was impossible in the times of social distancing. They had to figure out a way to deal with this and they decided to prepare packaged meals during this time, because closing down the kitchen at a time of such emergency would make no sense. They had to adapt to the circumstances and follow a new, practical strategy to continue following their mission. I find that particular moment of adaptation a quite integral part of this conversation around compromise.

Speaking of compromise, one of the most challenging and often time-consuming parts of collective work is how we make decisions together and you brought that up just now. I'd be interested to hear how did that work for you as a group and what were the tools that you brought from your collective work at Omuz or what are the tools that you are taking back with you?

An incredible part of this residency was that we actually practiced being a collective. We didn't have to, but it came as natural to our practices and I find that quite intriguing. We all come from different contexts and backgrounds and as much as we share the common language of art, we have different ways of practice and expression. We visited many self-organized structures in Athens and the question we often asked was, "how do you make decisions?" Of course, it was a variety of spaces with different purposes, but for instance Communitism spoke of a "code of ethics" instead of a "code of conduct" and FAC offered a "code of contact" instead of a "code of conduct" and introduced us the circle method as a way of decision making, which was something we were practicing already in our group. These responses were quite interesting. Also, thinking about our roles in the group. Joey is a facilitator of an arts union in New York City, for example, and works with larger groups and is curious to look for ways of facilitation for those who are underrepresented in the US society in general. Margarita is involved in mediation quite physically and organizes self-defense and physical theater workshops in order to negotiate and to exercise power. Our methods of engagement with this topic are quite different and we practice different ways of decision making. As a group, I think we were strong listeners and not only heard what the other was saying, but also had a response to our bodily or facial reactions to things. It slowed us down a lot, in terms of research, but I think it was very important to practice. For instance, at moments of silence where nobody wanted to take the floor, we followed a method, which involved an object as a proxy for a microphone and whoever held the object had the microphone. They were the speaker and we went around in the circle, so everybody would have a say and everybody expressed an opinion. It was beautiful because it created a continuity in thought. Somehow the person speaking right after the other always responded to the one before. It was also a way of listening and of course responding to the previous person. I think I'm more interested in taking back tools that are not so much the applied methodologies, like the rock or the circle method, but more things that happened organically. Like I said, this became a space for deep listening and reading each other and sometimes letting someone lead, as part of the practice, which was something we exercised in Margarita's studio yesterday, where we were exercising and negotiating power through physical exercises. This one included two hands that would touch and turn and take turns in telling stories, which would mean that you would apply some pressure through the hand, but then the person who was leading and adding pressure was the storyteller. It's also about understanding those dynamics and letting someone lead as well. There were also things that did not function in our way of decision making.

Like what?

We did act like a collective, but we also don't work towards a collective goal. After this residency, as much as we are going to be in touch, we are all going back to our lives. I think at some point we gave up on the initial decisions we made. For example, someone brought up that whoever was absent for a decision on that day would just go by the decision that was made by the other members of the collective. Now I'm speaking like we are members of a collective. But then it didn't work because we're only here for a certain amount of time and we wanted to actually include everyone's opinion and things. So, every decision we made here was a result of consensus and this is what slowed us down, but at the same time, I think it was a strong part of the time that we spent here.

Well, thank you very much for sharing and also sharing about your peers in the group and the way that you worked together. I also enjoyed a lot the exercise with the contact yesterday while practicing with Harry. We ended up dancing in Margarita's studio. Aslı, as an artist you are also interested in researching the notion of sleep and its segmentation and normalization from the medieval times to this day. One of the readings that you did as a group was "The Politics of Sleep", which talks about the right to rest, seeing sleep as a social instead of an act of isolation and of how we have come to adopt a normative model of sleep due to the ways this is tied to the institutions that inscribe our lives. I'm bringing this up because as a group, I would say that you managed to break this norm through a collective experiment that ended up with all of you spending the night at the Onassis AiR house. I want to know all about this night.

Well, I'll start from my research. Part of my research included playing with segmented sleep, which I tried to apply during the beginning of the quarantine in my house. The repetitive days were starting to bother me and I saw this as something that could perhaps play with the idea of the day and night and the way we perceive them. Segmented sleep is basically sleeping in two blocks instead of one. The first block between 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. and the second block is between 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. till 9 a.m. This gives you that two or three-hour time block in the middle of the night, which in the medieval times was a time where the entire household would be up doing chores, eating, visiting neighbors, having sex. So, it was a shared time. In my case, the household, which was my mom and my sister, was asleep and this became my individual pocket of time. I spent most of this time writing or doing some watercolors as I knew many writers and artists use this time as a time for isolation with less stimuli and a clear space for thought. It's another way of inventing productive time and that's the challenge of it. You propose this as an idea to play with this idea of time as a construct and then you also try to figure out ways to make that time more productive. As a group, what we did in the residency, like when we spent the night here, we also turned it into a planned night that we didn't follow, but we kind of managed to invert the day and night and play with the idea of productivity and the intended use of institutional space as well through sleeping, which was something Harry was very interested in. I think he wants to propose to have a bed in the space.

That would be amazing!

The text that we referred to "The Politics of Sleep" by Julia Morandeira describes sleep "as a moment of active replenishing and the reparation of the perceptive capacities that have been undone during the day. It is the place where our sensibility and mundanity lay their roots. It coincides with the matebolization of the day, of what has been ingested and experienced with neurological reorganization and with memory consolidation. In its monotonous repetition -day in, day out- it becomes a central function of quotidian life, enabling the possibility of learning and attention. It is a moment of suspension, of disconnection from the media and devices we operate with, a moment of inactivity and uselessness. And it is also one of the few remaining experiences where, knowingly or not, we abandoned ourselves to the care of others." I'm particularly interested in the moment of suspension here and my interest in sleep in my research is currently leaning towards exploring the temporal differences between plants and humans, which involves a closer look at nocturnal plant life and dormancy, that can again be used as metaphors for the way we perceive or use time.

Well, I'm moving to the next question, which has to do about a collective research trip that you did together. In your application, you stated that you think about artist residencies as fungal networks and this relates to your trip because when you were in Pelion, you also went mushroom picking. That was one of the highlights, as far as I recall. I wanted to ask you about the trip and your findings there.

I think what I meant was quite a formal metaphor, where I was referring to the mushrooms we observe on the surface as the fruits of an entire web under the terrain. I do think that the time we spent here is not limited to these seven weeks, but will continue to expand over time. The foraging trip we did in Pelion was incredible because it was an exercise on seeing and attention and mushroom foraging is a silent exercise. It was fascinating to share the silence with the group as we walked around. Once you start seeing the mushrooms, you just start seeing more. They keep showing up and the more you know about them, the less sure you feel about identifying them. Each one has its own center. Each one is its own thing, and they stimulate two senses, sight and taste. When we were sure of the ones to cook, the mushrooms also allowed us to spend time in the kitchen together to cook and taste and to talk about what it was like and the whole experience and to have fun.

Aslı, we are reaching the end of our discussion and I'm very curious to know what are your next plans and what are you bringing back with you?

During our time here as Movement V of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, we were invited to participate in the upcoming issue of the Arts of the Working Class, a journal for art and society based in Berlin. I thought this could be a good time to bring up the timeline Saliha Yavuz, the initiator of Omuz, started. It's a timeline that I'm studying. It's called "Organization and Solidarity in the visual arts in Turkey between 1909 and 2020." It's a work in progress. It will include this year and it's going to get updated every year. It includes dates and color codes, which refer to important historical events, magazines, funds, associations, human rights based initiatives, independent initiatives and collectives. As a continuation of the research, after this residency, we decided as a group to create the skeleton of such a timeline in the Greek context and to open it up to the artistic community here to fill it up over time. I'm curious to see what it will look like and also to be able to see the parallels with the timeline from Turkey as the Ottoman residue remains in the cultural sphere of both nation states. Besides that, as the Omuz dictionary group, we will be organizing our third talk in the upcoming weeks. Omuz dictionary started as a repository of words that highlight the conditions under which the network was founded. Maybe I can list some of the words that we have. They're quite broad, but they include things like recognition, proactive, urgency, union, production cost, artist fee, some terms that are very familiar to us working in the art world, but maybe not as much to the people that are not part of this community. Also, a lot of the words that are lost in translation or don't have much of a meaning in Turkish. The dictionary group is interested both in support mechanisms and in bringing existing and unspoken problems in the field to light with an awareness of the precarious nature of support structures like these that run the risk of becoming a cover up that simultaneously supports systemic exploitation. It seeks participation beyond resource exchange. While a necessary step, financial and other forms of support in themselves are only an interestitial solution, a means to end. With that in mind, the intention of Omuz dictionary is to become a tool for resistance by developing its own narrative.

It's a very important process that you've started with the dictionary. I think that we share the same kind of problematic in Greece, because in Greece and Turkey we are speaking two languages that are not part of the canon, let's say. We're always used to speak in English, to read in English. All the academic texts are in English and this is also a process of reclaiming a sort of identity or not necessarily protecting a certain kind of identity, but actually decolonizing the way that contemporary art is presented and distributed and mediated in our contexts.

Yeah, I think what we were interested in after having long conversations about what the form of this dictionary is going to look like, was that instead of providing static entries where we kind of encapsulate and put an end to the definition of the word, it functions more as a dissemination platform, assembling a web of potential definitions for each word based on various experiences. From this web of words, we have so far picked and paired words and invited academics, artists, activists to discuss what the terms refer to in today's conditions. We don't really try to bring a definition to any word and then say that this is the definition that Omuz came up with. Instead, we invite people to talk about them. The first talk we did was on "Insecurity and Urgency". The second one was on "Urgency and Solidarity", because we take the words from the previous talk and the third, which is going to happen in the first week of November, is "Solidarity and Uncertainty". It will be held between Cavidan Soykan, a researcher expertizing on forced migration and refugee studies alongside Tuba İnal Çekiç from the Off-University team in Berlin, who focuses on urban movements and urban commons from a participatory planning perspective and Malaz Usta, a Syrian artist, graphic designer and filmmaker living in Turkey. We will be approaching forced migration through the larger umbrella of solidarity and uncertainty, zooming in on the uncertain conditions immigrants face, especially in the fields of art and culture. We hope to see you there!

In terms of the timeline, I think that it is a fantastic idea and thank you for proposing that because the timeline allows you to make connections, which is very important to understand the history and how the social and political movements are also influencing arts movements, where do you stand now in relation to the past and also the present that you are building. I think that it would be very interesting to compile these into this timeline and have it also in juxtaposition with the timeline that you are bringing from Turkey.

Of course it comes with a self-consciousness that we are not from this place and we've only been here for seven weeks. It doesn't mean that we are going to even attempt to tell the story of the place, but at least it's an idea that's out there. It's a skeleton that we leave back and if the artistic community here is interested in filling it in, I'm very interested in looking at the results and hopefully this will be a research material for someone. And of course, historical events are kind of mirroring each other during those times. It will be an interesting reading to see the two timelines.

Aslı, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing all these thoughts and ideas with me. It was a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you!

Thank you, Myrto!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.