Designing a Nation of Nomads
September 2022 - March 2023
ESKİŞEHİR
Designing a Nation of Nomads project consists of seminars addressing the history of the immigration phenomenon, which has become more and more visible and bitter today, its various forms, the sources of its negative effects on the lives of individuals and communities, as well as workshops aiming to build the imagination of a nomadic nation that reverses all this exclusion mechanism through creative processes.
The project is based on a conceptualization that describes not only those who are forced to be displaced for various reasons or have chosen to leave, but also those who have experiences that go beyond the definition of citizenship by states, as “immigrants”. Through this perspective, refugees, those who are excluded from the social sphere due to their sexual orientation and gender identity, those who cannot benefit from citizenship and urban rights due to their political preferences, and dissidents (even if they have not had to leave their place of residence) are also immigrants.
These seminars aim to place the origins of the experiences of these social segments in their historical and theoretical context, especially through the analysis of the exclusion mechanisms of nation states. The workshops on the other hand, which see exclusion as the starting point of the creative processes, aim to produce the creative representation of a society dreamt in which these exclusion mechanisms have disappeared. The project aims to analyze how the legal, cultural, urban and aesthetic interventions of nation-states are designed during their establishment and to imagine a pluralistic and inclusive nation of nomads while producing their parody. Designing a Nation of Nomads exhibition, in which the imagination of how the body, labour and free time can be organized independently of what the state envisages will be expressed through performance, music, architectural and design, and the catalogue containing all the discussions and designs will be presented to the public as outputs of the project.
