COLLECTIVE CUKURCUMA READING GROUP – 6th 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. Most recently for the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial’s “School of Time,” the reading group focused 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 by organizing three different reading sessions. In 2019 the reading group will continue its meetings in various cities around the world.
Week V
Date – Wednesday October 2, 2019
Location – SALT Galata
Number of participants – 12
Selected Texts – Staying with the Trouble, Making kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Discussion questions –
– How to translate the new terms and concepts that Haraway suggests for the Chthulucene into Turkish, discuss.
– What does SF stand for and how it evolves throughout the chapters?
– Discuss the relations between the text’s methodology and layers of themes?
– Connections and relations between the film (Story Telling for Earthly Survival) and the book.
– Discuss the choice of the terminology of Haraway explaining selected use of concepts from Chapter 1
– In which ways Chthulucene is different than current discussions in Anthropocene and Capitalocene?
Week II
Date – Tuesday, February 20th, 2019
Location – CCA, San Francisco
Number of participants – 4
Selected Texts –
Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group – Sam Bardaouil
Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents – Editor(s): Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, Nada Shabout
Discussion questions –
– How was your week?
– Qur’an as a methodology – what does it mean?
– The Islamic concept of time – what does it mean?
– “The religion will affect you no matter what”
– Tip: Reading it out loud helps with Jalal Toufic text.
– Listen to Hyperallergic podcast on art and liberty.
Week I
Date – Tuesday, December 18th, 2018
Location – BASIS reading room, Frankfurt
Number of participants – 18
Selected Texts –
Witch-Hunting, Past and Present, and the Fear of the Power of Women by Silvia Federici from 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 096
The Cost for Love We are Not Willing to Pay by Etel Adnan from 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 006
Discussion questions –
– Discuss the relationship between the term ‘witch-hunt’ and witch-hunting in the 15th-18th century in Europe?
– Discuss the layers of fear the power of women according to Silvia Federici and their relation with witch-huntings?
– Two obsessions of Etel Adnan and their importance for her art.
– What is the main difference between these texts and how they situated themselves towards nature?
– Discuss the possibility of “love” according to Etel Adnan – “But what is love? And what are we giving up when we relinquish it? Love is not to be described, it is to be lived. We may deny it, but we know it when it takes hold of us. When something in ourselves submits the self to itself. Prisoner of oneself, that’s the lover. A strange fever. It may also sometimes happen that the element that provokes love is not necessarily human. A special case. Yes.”
– Discuss Caliban and the Witch and it’s relations with the new text of Silvia Federici – “As I wrote in Caliban and the Witch, the witch hunt instituted a regime of terror on all women, from which emerged the new model of femininity to which women would have to conform to be socially accepted in the developing capitalist society: sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination to the male world, accepting as natural their confinement to a sphere of reproductive activities that in capitalism have been completely devalued.”
COLLECTIVE ÇUKURCUMA 