COLLECTIVE CUKURCUMA READING GROUP – 5th Semester
Collective Çukurcuma Reading Group was initiated in 2015 by the two founding members of the Collective (Naz Cuguoğlu & Mine Kaplangı) with the addition of Gökcan Demirkazık. Besides semester-long thematic discussion sessions on such subjects as hauntology and archive-based artistic practices from the Middle East, the reading group has been invited to organize meetings in conjunction with various exhibitions in Istanbul, most notably as part of the public program of the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017. For the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial’s “School of Time,” the reading group will focus on the catastrophic imagination, passage of time in the shadow of impending disasters, and how survival (of death or disaster) shapes an understanding of time and culture.

WEEK 1

Date –  Saturday, October 6th, 2018
Location –  SALT Galata Workshop Room 4
Number of participants – 5
Selected Texts – How to Kill People: A Problem of Design by Hito Steyerl, Time A Vocabulary of the Present by Joel Burges and Amy Elias

 
Discussion questions –

– Discuss the differences between these conceptions of time; contemporary, simultaneity and semantics of present regarding time studies.
– Discuss the layers of time in Christian Marclay’s The Clock work.
– What is the importance and emergence of time studies according to Paul Virilio?
– What is the main difference between the extinction and adaptation regarding to Ursula Heise?
– Discuss how to understand ‘time’ through Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death in Hito Steyerl’s How to Kill People: A problem of design article.

WEEK 2

Date – Sunday, October 7th, 2018
Location – SALT Galata Workshop Room 4
Number of participants – 6
Selected Texts – Selected parts from In Catastrophic Times by Isabelle Strengers

Discussion questions –

– What does ‘cold panic’ mean for Isabelle Strengers and how does it placed into our lives and by whom?
– Discuss the origins of Gaia in Greek mythology and it’s relation with our understandings of earth/place/nature regarding the text.
– Discuss experimenting and allowing failure as learning methods regarding Isabelle Strengers.
– Users, practitioners, operators, Guardians, judges, decision makers… Discuss and compare these categories through out chapters.
– Discuss collective thinking and imagining as learning methods and their relation with ‘joy’ regarding the text especially within the final chapter’s various parts where Spinoza mentioned.
– How can be discuss our understanding the concept of time regarding our current relations with Gaia, while facing barbarism and waiting even worse to resist?

WEEK 3

Date – Wednesday, October 17th, 2018
Location – SALT Galata Yaratıcı Sanat Ofisi 
Number of participants – 9
Selected Texts – The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster by Jalal Toufic, 
Ölüm Terbiyesi by Zeynep Sayın

Discussion questions –

-What are the similarities in which these two texts approach concepts of ‘death, resurrection and tradition’?
-Toufic’s selection of words carry on more than their initial meaning, discuss the title “The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster”.
-Discuss and elaborate Toufic’s choice of word ‘resurrection’, it’s application to mysticism, contemporary art, filmmaking and so on. 
-Specific to your time, geography and culture, discuss the ways in which rituals and residues of matters of death surface. 
– Discuss the relations between the selection of images in Zeynep Sayın’s text regarding the graveyards, headstones and gravestones.