Words and Photography by Peter Stanners
and flyers & snapshots by various artists
We
landed in Istanbul at sunrise. The air was dry and warm and the day
looked set to be a scorcher; such a far cry from the pre-autumnal
drizzle that we'd left behind in Copenhagen. We were herded through
passport control, the Scandinavians breezing through to the baggage
terminal. And then there was me. A cursory flick through my British
passport, "Visa? No Visa". What? Huh? But surely I'm European, we're
all europ... Then it dawns on me. I'm not in Europe anymore.
I get escorted to a little plexiglass office around the corner where I get asked for £20, $20 or €20
for my admittance, which I don't have, so I get marched through
passport control by a sour little woman to a cash machine then back to
the visa man who inspects my notes, fresh from the cash machine,
against the glaring halogen light in his booth. He peels off what looks
like a cheap looking postage stamp, sticks it into my passport and
waves me away. I deliver my newly validated passport to the young
looking immigration official who examines it and eyes me knowingly.
"English? Speak English well yes?" he asks. "Yes, yes of course I do."
He places my passport on his desk and starts scribbling words on a
small piece of paper. He presents them to me. "Dungeon? What is this?"
Sorry? Hold on, wait a minute, is this some sort of intimidation, some
initiation ritual? "A
dungeon? It's like a prison, except underground, and dark." I gesture
what I hope in sign language might represent a dungeon before ploughing
through 'morsel' and 'desolate'. He then smiles and hands me back my
passport. "Thanks you" he says "Welcome to Istanbul".
above Triangle artist Michael Mørkholt by The Galata Bridge by the Bosporus
Istanbul
lies on the Bosporus, a channel of water much narrower than the Øresund
that links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the
Mediterranean. This channel bisects a narrow strip of land, about 30km
wide, which makes it easily controllable. Which is important when it is
the most direct link from Europe to Asia. Much is made of Istanbul's
unique position, of it holding the prestigious honour of being the only
city in the world to straddle two continents. A city has existed on the
site since 660BC and in the ensuing two and a half millennia has been
the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin and Ottoman Empires.
General Ataturk spoiled the fun in 1930 when, as part of his radical wave of
reforms aimed at secularising the defunct Ottoman Empire, crowned
Ankara the capital of the new Turkish state and renamed Byzantium,
Istanbul.
We
had to negotiate a small fleet of taxis to ferry us into Istanbul,
despite the promise of a designated "Triangle Bus" that should have
picked us up. I pack myself into a taxi, that unsurprisingly provided
us with no seatbelts, with three Danish strangers and off we hurtle
down the motorway towards Istanbul. The sun is well risen, the day
truly started, the blanket of humid heat gently offset by the air
roaring through the open window which offers views of miles and miles
of concrete housing estates and industrial complexes set in an arid
wasteland. I sip Søren’s whiskey and begin slipping further into that
semi lucid state of beginning a new day without having ended the last,
when suddenly the landscape drops away and we’re confronted by a blue,
shimmering panorama. The Bosphorus twinkles below and Europe beckons
ahead and I try as hard as I can to appreciate the moment of crossing
from one continent to another in a taxi with total strangers, headed
into the depths of an unfamiliar city whose historical majesty is
globally unparalleled. But the wonderment eluded me, and I just sipped
on the whiskey smoking my fifth cigarette of the day with a rising
sense of nausea.
Istanbul
is the first corner of the Triangle Project with New York and
Copenhagen occupying the other two. Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen (above) created it as a
musical and artistic exchange program. Tall, thirty something, with a
slight stoop and a bald head, he was the brains behind the whole thing.
This is the first stage, bringing Danish artists and musicians to
Istanbul. I meet Jacob on the top floor of The Hall, A 130-year-old
recently renovated Armenian Church, converted into top-end venue by a
canny Brit, Allan. The Hall served as the Triangle Project’s
headquarters and primary venue. The control room was on the top floor,
a glass table cluttered with laptops and ash trays, drafts of the
schedules stuck to walls, two resident mongrel kittens with its soot
black mother and a roof terrace overlooking the densely populated side
streets of Beyoglu, downtown Istanbul. It is only the second time I had
ever met him, his big, yellow, wraparound sunglasses and cargo shorts
making him look more like an off-duty marine in Operation Desert Storm
than trans-Atlantic conceptual artist. His thoughtful eyes and easy
manner are inviting though, and we are soon on the terrace talking
about how crazy it is to be here while the sun fries my virgin
northern-European skin.
Beyoglu
is a district on the east side of the river on the European side of
Istanbul. Through it runs Istiklal (above), one of the longest walking streets
in the world with a million visitors a day. Down it runs a tram, it’s
red and reminds me of the trams I’ve seen in movies of San Francisco,
except it doesn’t climb obnoxiously steep hills and is pretty slow. It
was apparently built to ferry bankers from where they lived at Taksim Square to the banking district, by the Galata Tower, at the other end.
It’s a steep walk downhill from here to the river and is probably one
of the strangest neighbourhoods I’ve been to. First it was the music
shops, dozens of them all selling identical merchandise down a few
streets. Then there was a similar lighting district, with hundreds of
shops all selling the same identical light bulbs. Then the random
tubing streets and the second hand furniture stores and the sign making
neighbourhood, all in segregated districts, all competing to sell the
same products as everyone else. Pretty much the opposite retail model
of North-America and, increasingly, Europe where massive super stores
sell everything you could possibly ever need under one roof, in one
self contained district.
The
first few days drift by uneasily. I suffer without sleep, becoming
nervous and unsettled until my body catches up with the hours. By the
end of the second day I had begun to feel settled. We had dinner on a
roof terrace and I ate fresh sea bass to views of the monumental
mosques, lit up brightly across the river. Down below, the streets were
noisy and chaotic but so much more alive than pre-autumnal Copenhagen
where once people feel the first bitter east wind of the season retreat
indoors to hibernate. Tanja Schlander is with us, a tall skinny redhead
who plays upon her uncanny likeness to Pippi Longstockings. I think she
was a key organiser with the project and she talks of her time in Århus
at art school then moving to Israel. She gives me knowing sideways
looks as I speak to her about my photography. All the way through I’m
reminding myself, “Peter, these aren’t people you can bullshit.” I
ended up sounding pretty dull.
CLUB DIRTY PARTY - Hosted by DJ Bang!
The
next night was the first real party. Copyflex and Kid Kishore (below) played
the most incredible improvised bhangra, electro mashup with samples of
the Colonel talking about the Biennale. Åsmund, aka Copyflex, had come
to Istanbul to also represent the Colonel and his Biennalist movement.
Coinciding with the Triangle Project, the 10th
Istanbul Biennale is a massive international art show with
installations all over Istanbul.
above image
"optimism in the age of global war" by
Burak Arikan
The 10th Istanbul Biennial's theme was
“Not only
possible, but necessary; Optimism in the Age of Global War.”
The
Biennalist movement was devised by Colonel to encourage dialogue on
this topic; is it real optimism? Why should we be optimistic? Should we
be optimistic about global war at art conferences that are sponsored by
multinational corporations (Saab, sponsor of the prominent Documenta
modern art festival, produces warplanes). We wore white headbands with
‘Biennalist’ written on them in red to encourage lively, optimistic
debate on the subject. They looked pretty cool.
I
flitted between the Hall and Dirty throughout the night photographing
Rosa Lux (above)
Copyflex (above and below with Christian Marcus a.k.a. DJ St Marcus)
Kid Kishore and Istanbul’s very
own Bang! (in below e-flyer from DogzStar)
..causing a general raucous with the local crowd. I meet Arim
and Hakan who wonder why we’re here. They’re young, early twenties and
spoke good English. “You’re from Denmark? I would love to move to
Scandinavia.” Hakan tells me. I tell him its cold and dark for ¾ of the
year but he shrugs. “Turkey is not humanist you know?” he says “It is
so hard to get things done. It is not organised.”
I ask him why he
doesn’t go. It’s difficult, he tells me. It’s hard to get visas to work
and visit and even then it’s too expensive to go without having some
work. “If Turkey would join the EU it would give us the opportunity to
do more.” I ask how many people are like him and Arim, educated English
speakers. “Not so many” he says, “Even in Istanbul.”
It’s
a sentiment expressed by Cev Edit and the band ‘Reverie Falls On All’
the next day at a Turkish artist talk in the hall. Cev Edit’s opinion
of Istanbul and Turkey is not overly optimistic. It’s a draining
experience with little international opportunity and exposure. Military
service is compulsory for all men except for those in education, which
explains their long stays at university. Things are getting better in
Turkey though he says. Specialist Universities were opened in 2000 in
Turkey that allows for more opportunity for Turks to study art and
music without having to take the more competitive traditional route
through academies. This might encourage a new breed of less
conventional artists who don’t deal with typical Middle Eastern themes
such as war and headscarves, which he himself is trying to stay away
from.
On an English Stomach
I
wake up the night after eating a donner kebab and my guts are upset
with me. Cramping, diarrhoea and nausea keep me away from the action
and close to a toilet. I can’t eat or drink without feeling like
wanting to be violently ill. Nick (the one
half of Bitchslap) and his girlfriend Mille eventually arrive and we
end up chilling on the street outside the hall for the evening. It is
rented out tonight for a special wedding party and we sit outside while
Silencio, MHM 1 and Rudeless paint on the adjacent wall next door to
the transsexual brothel (below).
The brothel and the Hall have inverse opening
hours so that the one doesn’t infringe on the business of the other;
nobody wants to get caught going to have transsexual sex by their mates
on their way to the Hall for a night out. The wedding caterers operate
out of a modified lorry with full kitchen facilities in the back. As
they pass by they offer us incredible canapés and hour d’oeuvres that
we snack on while watching the stream of upper class Turks arrive in
cars with blacked out windows.
Serdar, our local street gangster who
arranged our painting walls in exchange for a small homage to him,
guided the traffic and the local men sat on the undersized stools
outside the little teahouse watching on. It was a good night.
The
next evening I went to the hospital. There is only so long that I can
manage going to the toilet five times an hour, being afraid of farting
and perpetual stomach cramps. Tanja and Sarohan, one of the Hall
employees, take a taxi with me to the local Turkish emergency room.
People were slumped on the floor bleeding, burned and crying for
attention. A foreigner with an upset stomach didn’t impress them. I was
diagnosed as having a stomach ulcer, had a shot in my ass and was told
to vacate the bed for some guy who’d been stabbed in the arm.
I fainted
and was brought back in, given oxygen and nitrous gas to wake me up.
Sarohan, acting as my translator, was speaking feverishly about the
diagnosis with a doctor who casts me unsympathetic glances as he throws
his arms in the air and walks out the room. Sarohan’s by my bed, “Pete,
do you have insurance? There’s a private German hospital up the road.”
We get to the German hospital and in hardly any time I’m upstairs in a
private room with a drip in my arm waiting for the blood tests. Sarohan
smokes out of the window and talks to me about Turkey. “I would love to
be able to leave” he says. “But it doesn’t really look likely.”
Dogzstar Saturday September 8th 2007
Saturday
night, I’m fully recovered thanks to antibiotics that mean I shouldn’t
drink. I’m a bit dizzy because I had a few beers anyways and I ‘m
thinking perhaps drinking isn’t the best idea.
I’m in the Dogzstar and
people are gathered on the main floor waiting for Alberstlund Terror
Korps (Kid Kishore and VJ Cancer) to come on stage. Cancer has been
preparing his visuals all week, drawing by hand, scanning and colouring
in on paint.
They come on stage in their green shirts, ties and masks
when a chav barges to the front of the crowd, armed with a spray can
and with a green stocking over her face. She starts spraying on fabric
and ripping it apart, throwing it into the crowd who retract in an
uneasy confusion, not knowing if this is part of the act. The music
starts up, “Tag din telefon jeg ska’ snak… med dig, tag din telefon jeg ska’ snak snak med dig” and
the techno drops when Yanne, dressed as an alien invader, appears
hanging over the railings of the upper level. It’s a techno,
ghetto-hardcore, alien invasion urban terror experience. Huge green ATK
flags manned by Teppop are flying over the packed dance floor in the
midst of which the alien and chav are scuffling for supremacy.
above Teopop who also performed at Dogzstar
People
were clearly suffering the day after when we gathered for Åsmund’s
(above) artist run (below).
above film still by Martin K Jørgensen who documented the whole week together with Sarah Rex
With our red and white ‘Biennalist’
headbands and posters explaining the Biennalist movement stuck to our
bodies, we ran down a packed Istiklal, shouting “optimist!” and
laughing and smiling and discussing the motto of this year’s Biennale
while people wearily watched the spectacle. A man in a light-blue shirt
starts to run with us and I ask him if he’s ‘optimist’. “No I am
Kurdish.” He says with a smile and runs on.
Monday The 10th of September 2007
The
final night was hosted by Bitchslap in the Hall. The acts were
fantastic!
above flyer by yours truly.
Gry (above by jayfugmik) with her haunting, looped electro pop, Michael
Mørkholt’s recorder accompanied laptop music,
Band Ane (above) with more laptop
music and her crazy homemade microphone. In the side room we had a mini
exhibition of Silencio’s posters and René Johannsen’s photographs while
in the main room we held a slideshow of photos I had taken so far in
Istanbul.
After performance artists Kargo had finished their show "Kargology"
“an
investigation of information patterns in public space as well as the
ways individual people experience the constant flow of information in
the city”
Mikkel Meyer (above)
Heidi Mortenson (above)
Copyflex, ATK, Rosa Lux and a various sortiment of the Triangle stable played and performed to the appreciative crowd.
above Paletti Cat Walk Performance
In The End of The Day
It’s
hard to reduce ten days, the drama and crises, misunderstandings and
exhaustion of the triangle project to a few pages. We only had a couple
of translators to communicate to the staff with and the constant
changes to schedules were a perpetual headache, never really knowing
what was going on where and when. I don’t think anyone really
appreciated how much hard work it was all going to be and by the time
is was the turn of Bitchslap to host a party, most people where so
exhausted you could feel the tension lingering in amongst the small
talk. It took me three days to recover. Lying in bed at home in
Copenhagen the stillness was so overwhelming I wanted put on some loud
trance to mimic the club down the street from the hostel that had
serenaded us to sleep with euphoric electro every night. I dreamt of
the wild street dogs police, the street vendors who toiled night and
day at half a dozen jobs just to get by and the friendly homeless man
who slept outside the hostel on cardboard who told us “In Istanbul, if
you have no friends, you have no hope of surviving.”
It
was a clever decision to have Istanbul as a destination for an art
project. It’s volatile, insecure and wild, held forcibly together by a
powerful military and police force who are trying to protect one
man’s secular vision of almost a century ago; a vision that is being
slowly eroded by the popular election of an Islamist president and the
call for the removal of the ban on headscarves at school and in the
workplace. The military has dissolved the government three times, 1960,
1971 and 1980, when they deemed its actions to be unconstitutional.
It
is still illegal to insult Ataturk. This combined with Turkey’s
obvious desire to become a part of the European Union results makes
Turkey a perfect destination for encouraging constructive dialogue,
artistic or otherwise. It is hard to assess what impact the project had
on Istanbul as a whole, whether the art was accessible to the general
population and not just the literate, educated few. It is a question,
however, that can also be asked of art anywhere.
I
kept on dreaming of Istanbul for days after I returned and the memory
of its energy still resonates in me. It is a fucking mental place that
had no signs of skateboarders but thousands of cops, stray dogs and
homeless people. Is it European though? With as many young people
looking west for inspiration, I can only hope that Turkey develops in a
direction that encourages its youth to stay and invest in it’s own
future once it joins the EU. Which might probably happen some decade
soon. For now though I was glad to be home with the rain and cold and
empty streets that are so typical of northern Europe. Seriously though,
who needs the EU when you have fabulous weather?
For more info on The Triangle Project go the blog
here