Learning from Airplants, Berlin, 2025

Learning from Airplants  project as part of Ortaokul Initiative’s program 

“What does your community need”, Berlin, 2025

Oda Projesi’s project Learning from Airplants began with the idea of closely

observing air plants Tillandsia together with the Willkommenklasse students

and exploring the possibilities of living and growing not from the earth but

from the air. These plants do not grow in soil and do not depend on soil or

ground to survive, absorb moisture and nutrients directly from the air and

their surroundings and hold onto trees, rocks, walls, or various surfaces

only temporarily. So we asked ourselves: What can we learn from t hese

plants? Through embodied practices, mimicking the adaptive strategies of

air plants, we explored with drawing, making small sculptural forms, jumping

and performing, how we might strengthen ourselves in moments of

transition. We imagined working on tools that could ease the students’

transition into a new country and remind them of the already existing

resilience and adaptability they carry within themselves wherever they go.

The project is realized toget her with Caoucharatou, Edwina, Hadia, John,

Maher, Myroslav, Negina, Tammy, Vitali, Youssef, Zuhra with the support of

Sophie, Ruken and Dana.

Much of a muchness, Berlin, 2024

Much of a muchness, Mad Tea Party performative gathering and exhibition in 

Signal Window at Emergency Project Room run by Chto Delat Collective, Berlin, 2024

Oda Projesi was invited to one of the “Mad Tea Party” workshop series
by Chto Delat’s Emergency Project Room. Özge Açıkkol and Seçil Yersel
from Oda Projesi took the title from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by
L. Carroll from which the title of the workshop series is also inspired
from: “The Mad Tea Party”. The concept “much of muchness” helped us
and the partipants to discuss the meaning of trying to find a space and
time for ourselves, for our bodies, minds, thoughts, acts and motions in
these times of “muchness" of all kinds. Muchness is integrated in variety,
richness, plurality but also in the incredible amount of displacements,
migrations and movements done with human interaction as the result of
different types of violence taking place in the world right now. A
ceremony took place in two parts where we focused on the complexity
of "being human” by creating an encounter where we wished to visualize
approaches both from human and non-human perspective through these
questions: What do you think is muchness? What kind of a non-human
are you?

A performative guided walking tour: Yürüyen Arşiv: Bir komşuculuk pratiği , İstanbul 2025

“Walking Archive: A Practice of Neighbouring”, a performative

audio-walk by Oda Projesi and Seda Yıldız as part of a cooperation between

HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg and Performistanbul

Oda Projesi organized a performative guided walking tour in collaboration

with the independent curator and academician Seda Yıldız. Participants wore

earphones and revisited the artistic, social and discursive projectst hat Oda

Projesi realised in Galata, Istanbul between 2000 and 2005. Accompanied by

a spoken narrative and a sound collage featuring the voices of neighbours

past and present, participants explored the neighbourhood, which has

undergone significant gentrification, from a contemporary perspective.

The audio walk followed by a picnic around an archive box invited

participants to remember collectively, share knowledge and reflect toget her

on the following questions: How can practice of neighbouring that builds

multilayered relationships between Oda Projesi, neighbors and other actors

be presented and documented? How can an archive of relationing be

shared? What does revisiting a practice of neighbouring in a time of shrinking

public space mean? The picnic was hosted by Performistanbul with its

members’ warm invitation, as a new alternative space at the very same

neighbourhood where Oda Projesi run its space.

 

Radio Map of Oda Projesi by Aylin Önel

 

This map was created by Aylin Önel for Waves: Radio as Collective Imagination book that Oda Projesi contributed with an interview. 

For another radio related Oda Projesi interview by Özge Açıkkol and Seda Yıldız is at Radio as Radical Education book edited by Nora Sternfeld and Gregoire Rousseau.

Invisible Labor and Motherhood / On Air

 Listen from here: motherhood on air

For Radyo Bienal, Oda Projesi invites other women to reflect on invisible labour, motherhood and the radio. This is a sequel to 'Radio Within a Radio', which was a series of contributions by Oda Projesi to the Turkish edition of Radyo Bienal, broadcasted throughout 2021 on Açık Radyo. Oda Projesi is also invited to the 17th Istanbul Biennial with their 'Anne(x)' newspaper on motherhood.

Güneş Savaş invites four female artists Myriam Varela, María Gimeno, Karen Raicher and Aylin Önel who are not living in their birth country. They answered the same questions from within their own situatednesses and perspectives: What does it mean to feel like you belong somewhere? Through what kinds of labour action does the house become a space of belonging?

Özge Açıkkol invites Elin Strand Ruin and Biray Kolluoğu. The artist/architect Elin Strand Ruin responds to a set of questions by Oda Projesi: Is it possible to make a revolution in the kitchen and if so, what kind of revolution would it be? Elin refers to her work-in-progress 'Praxagora Kitchen' that took different forms in public space in two neighbourhoods in Stockholm. Biray Kolluoğlu is a professor of Sociolgy in Boğaziçi University. She reflects on the 'invisible labour of the egg' and elaborates on the power of naturalizing and denaturalizing. 

Seçil Yersel invites Kija Benford, the founder of Vrouwenmantel Art Research Group that is a Dutch-based art initiative specialising on the research of the maternal arts. Kija Benford directs three questions by Oda Projesi to mother and artist Eefje Wijnings, Danni van Amstel and Chloë Marsden: Is there a connection between invisible domestic labour and the invisibility of the radio? How can invisible labour have visibility within the invisible radio field? Does gossip make the invisible, visible? Through what kinds of labour action does the house become a space of belonging?

ANNE(X) 7.th ISSUE / 17th İstanbul Bienalle 2022

                                                            anne(x) meydan in english   

anne(x) in English 

Anne(x) TR & ENG                                    

Oda Projesi’s multi-format participation in the Biennial is informed by the collective’s longstanding research into ‘motherhood and production’ and a series of meetings and interviews conducted with groups of mothers and non-mothers from the cultural sector in various geographies. Audio excerpts from their ongoing conversation series were featured in the weekly transmissions of Radyo Bienal at Açık Radyo 95.0, ‘parasitically’ leaking into its regular programming and questioning concepts like care, precariousness and sisterhood. The collective features in the channel’s English-language podcast seriesand launches the seventh edition of its Anne(x) newspaper during the Biennial with a series of public and more intimate conversations. The printed Turkish edition of the newspaper can be accessed from the reading rooms in the biennial venues Barın Han and Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, as well as the P Building of Müze Gazhane and the Istanbul Bookstore in Gazhane.

Oda Projesi was 22 hours on air at Radio Art Zone / 27 august 2022

 https://radioart.zone/saturday-27-august

If Oda Projesi makes a radio within a radio only for 22 hours, what would it sound like? What sounds can this radio carry? In 2005 for a local radiochannel in Istanbul Oda Projesi did a programme that was called "radio within a radio 101.7EFEM". There we "acted" as if a radio channel; with news, interviews, advertisements, but also parasites interfering with and within the radio channel. (The programme originated from a pirate radio station we have organized with Matthieu Prat in the neighbourhood of Oda Projesi in 2005 for one month; just before leaving our project space.) Now if we have 22 hours then we plan to have 22 people, 22 places, 22 acts, 22 strategies, 22 incidents in this 22 hours of broadcasting. The main concern will be (can be) on motherhood (as this is a theme we are currently working on). The members of the collective, who have focused their research on "motherhood and production" since 2013, have had a series of conversations with groups of mothers who are not limited to their own experiences. During these meetings, “How were our daily life and art practices shaped after becoming a mother? How did maternal states affect our production? "What does it mean to be a mother and an artist at the same time?" were some of the questions.