The Pavilion of Turkey at the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice, features the project Darzanà. Curated by Feride Çiçekoglu, Mehmet Kütükçüoglu and Ertug Uçar, with curatorial collaborators Cemal Emden and Namik Erkal, the exhibition team of Darzanà consists of Hüner Aldemir, Caner Bilgin, Hande Cigerli, Gökçen Erkiliç, Nazli Tümerdem and Yigit Yalgin.
Darzanà is a project about frontier infringement and on hybridity. It challenges the increasing confinement within borders of religion, language, race, nationality, ethnicity and gender. The project highlights the common cultural and architectural heritage shared between the arsenals of Istanbul and Venice. For the Biennale Architettura 2016, a last vessel, Bastarda, has been constructed out of abandoned materials found in the old dockyard of Istanbul and transported to Venice to suggest a new connection in Mediterranean.
Darzanà means dockyard and it is a hybrid word, like the Turkish word tersane and the Italian word arsenale. These words are derived or distorted from the same root, the Arabic dara’s-sina’a (place of industry). They all originate from the common language that developed in the Mediterranean from the 11th to the 19th century among people such as sailors, travellers, merchants, and warriors. Known as Lingua Franca, this was a shared language when Mediterranean was the main vessel connecting the surrounding cultures. In the same vein, it is possible to talk of a common architectural language and to define it as Architectura Franca.
For the project Darzanà, a last vessel, Bastarda was built earlier this year at an abandoned shipshed at the Haliç dockyards in Istanbul. Similar to Darzanà, Bastarda is also a hybrid word. Derived from bastardo, Bastarda is a cross between a galley and a galleon and is propelled by oars and sails. As a symbol of Mediterranean hybridity, Bastarda creates a bridge between the two shipyards, one left to rot away in the megacity of Istanbul, the other springing to life only at certain times of the year in the museum-city that is Venice.
The Pavilion of Turkey, coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and co-sponsored by Schüco Turkey and VitrA, is located at the Sale d’Armi, Arsenale.
Images courtesy of Cemal Emden
Discover: iksv.org
