Capacity Building Workshops for Culture Civic Project
The aim was to reach out to the people who are at the intersection of artistic & cultural production and civil society organisations. Having has the chance to design the very first of the 12 workshop series, I came up with the idea of asking “who owns the culture?/whose culture” as a re-visit to the basics. As we are all well aware that there are hundreds of definitions of culture, I choose to start with the anthropological definition of culture to deep dive. and invited Ayfer Bartu Candan to tell the transformation of anthropological definition of culture and also the science itself and another anthropologist, Levent Soysal, to interrogate various uses of culture in 2022. Then we welcomed one case -study: Matbakh | Mutfak workshop from Gaziantep, as an illustration of a project process. The architect-researcher Merve Bedir told us the years-long mutual relationship between her body of how and the field, how the ideas and collaborations forms and informs her own journey and how she approaches them by concepts or proposals such as the concept of “hospitality ” or “yer sofrası”.
Local cultural policy practise and it’s making have always been one of the research topics that is close to my heart. My interest goes back to field work and collaborative studio experience that I gained as an urban planner (BA) which taught me the basis of strategic thinking and stakeholder approach, but more importantly subsidiarity principle, which could be simplified as “the public functions should be exercised as close as the citizen”. So when it comes to delivery of arts and culture programmes or local cultural policy making, I am always in favour of whatever closest to bone and see my responsibility is to hold the space to enable such presences.
When I received the call to design the first two capacity development programmes on the behalf of Anadolu Kultur within the scope of CultureCivic Project, I felt more than honoured. Anadolu Kultur has been celebrating its 20 years of best practice in alla around Anatolia this year.