birbuçuk

Seçil: Hello everyone, we've just come into the studio. I'm Seçil. We're with you at a completely different hour, on a completely different day — outside Açık Dergi. This is Açık Radyo's special broadcast for the listener support project — we're at the 15th Radio Festival. Shall I give you the number of our listener support line? You can call 0212 343 41 41 and talk to our friends. Or you can click the "support us" button at acikradyo.com. At the last count, Ömer Madra said, 69 listeners had supported us today. We'd like to keep that going. We're starting a conversation with the birbuçuk collective — welcome, friends.

Birbuçuk: Thank you. Hello.

İlksen: Yes, we're with the birbuçuk collective, consisting of Ayşe Ceren Sarı, Yasemin Ülgen and Serkan Kaptan. On Açık Dergi the other day we'd actually heard about you, at the collectives meeting held at Kasa Gallery. And since we were about to discuss commons, and the 15th Radio Festival is about commons and shared assets, we said, do come — and you were kind enough not to turn us down. Thank you. Welcome. Shall we start with birbuçuk? Why birbuçuk?

Seçil: Three people, each with a half share. I actually think of it as something like a group of people who are shy about taking a full share.

Yasemin: Maybe I can say briefly why we do this. Ayşe, Serkan and I as the birbuçuk team have been organising sessions for about a year now on different topics within the field of ecology. Honestly, these sessions arose out of necessity. Because we noticed that art and ecology — which all three of us have in common — were not acquainted with one another. Starting from there, we put together a session programme spanning more than a year. We invite people working in different areas — water, biodiversity, borders, climate, mining, energy — to the sessions. These are artists and, besides artists, experts and academics who carry on their work in the field, or experienced people whose knowledge we trust. Our aim is actually to bring these two fields together through new acquaintances and partnerships. We can say we've slowly begun to make that happen. We think of it both as a field of research and as a method of mutual learning. And the "halves" actually represent the people who come to these sessions. We do of course have a name taken from the one-and-a-half degree threshold. But the conceptual framework is actually the coming together of the halves of all those experiences.

İlksen: The coming together of the halves of experiences. Can we open that up a little?

Ayşe: We can.

Ayşe: Yes — and I'm Ayşe. One of the things we aim to do — perhaps the most important — is to bring together the feeling of the artist and the fact of the academic. And to create a shared space here for thinking together. We mostly think about how to design that, actually.

İlksen: So you have an idea aimed at transgressing known boundaries — we can safely say that. Ecology and cultural production are also among the key areas Açık Radyo follows. And if we see Açık Radyo as one of the places where these come together — then on top of that, given the urgency of the age we're living in, there are the calls we keep playing on this broadcast, for everyone to act together, as soon as possible, with whatever they can do.

Seçil: Yes, there have been sessions so far. There have even been outputs. We'll ask you to speak about those too. But there's something in the sessions that Serkan Kaptan is also responsible for. There are core concerns that the birbuçuk collective holds. Let's hear a little about those, and then perhaps what's been discussed so far.

Serkan: I think a great deal about session practices. I attach great importance to how a session should be conducted. If people are giving us their time, if they're coming to our sessions, this session needs to be productive for those participants — and after the session we need to be able to draw our outputs from it productively and well. So within birbuçuk I actually concentrate my main thinking on these session practices. How should a session be held? What should the organisation and plan of a session look like? We've thought a great deal about it, all together. Actually, we built the session plan starting from our conclusions. We believe a session can't run longer than three hours. We thought that beyond three hours, people's attention wanders much more. And we decided that we could fit at most six invited guests into a three-hour session.

İlksen: Six speakers?

Serkan: Six speakers, yes. We call them "mouths" — we can invite six mouths to our sessions. We give half the session time to these people introducing themselves. At the start, these people talk — perhaps more candidly than at other academic meetings, perhaps going into more detail than they could anywhere else — about why they became interested in ecology, that is, how they drifted into this field, starting perhaps from their childhood, perhaps from their youth. Then in the remaining half of the session, we want people to share their own work, more focused on the topic. We steer people towards that. That way the outputs are more productive. We found it very productive. When we give half the session to people introducing themselves, we've seen a kind of bonding, a closeness emerge — and that this matters a great deal for how productive the session is.

İlksen: What comes to my mind, actually, is something like using the language of everyday life. I mean, when you say "session", something a little more academic comes to mind, but I sense you also want to catch hold of everyday language and build another language out of it.

Yasemin: We actually call the sessions a "solunum" — a breath. We try to come up with a new word for everything like this, to break out of these moulds.

İlksen: So you say "ağız" (mouth), you say "solunum" (breath). Can we say, then, that the birbuçuk collective is also out to produce a new kind of dictionary, in a way?

Yasemin: That develops on its own, I think. That language comes by itself. Not as a concern exactly, but it sounds nice. People step outside the limits they're used to. They share perhaps slightly different ideas. They too begin producing words. So we think it's a creative approach.

Seçil: Yes, changing names is genuinely useful. By the way, we mentioned the sessions' outputs — some of them have been published, as far as I know. The birbuçuk team also has a website.

Yasemin: Yes, birbuçuk.org — as session output. Not as "Ali said this, Ayşe said that, then someone said such-and-such" — we present it entirely as an anonymous text.

İlksen: Which sessions have outputs at the moment?

Yasemin: The water and metabolism sessions have outputs at the moment. They can access them online at birbuçuk.org. These outputs don't consist only of texts, only writing. And because artists also take part in our sessions, the visual works and video links they've produced on the topic can be found there too. So I think it's a rich text.

İlksen: Where do these sessions take place?

Yasemin: Studio-X hosts us — we're grateful to them. We hold them on weekends. As Serkan said, it's a session lasting three and a half to four hours. For each topic, we invite people who have specialised in that area, or artists who are pursuing their work on that subject. So each topic has different participants. And we develop the text of the conversation that emerges from bringing those six people together.

İlksen: So you set a topic before each session and reach out to people.

Yasemin: We're the ones who reach out to people. For anyone interested, we have a session programme, and its topics are fixed. We try to follow these as closely as possible. Based on these, we invite the participants for each session.

Seçil: Now you say this is taking shape around ecology, both as a scientific discipline and as a socio-political movement, on our planet and in the geography we belong to. What should we understand by ecological sensibility? Perhaps you could say a few words, telling us about your backgrounds too.

Ayşe: I'm a climate change economist. I'm also a dancer. I'm interested in the performing arts. I had a story that began with economics. From there it turned to energy. I did a master's in resource economics. Then I started working more in the field of political ecology, drifted in that direction. And since then I've been working on these topics through a network. I work on various projects. And alongside that I try to dance, let's say. For us the ecology question has this importance: on one hand there's the matter of it being worked on as a scientific discipline, and on the other we can speak of modes of relationship. When we say a socio-political matter, a movement, this is what we mean. By modes of relationship — we treat ecology as a commons. We're talking here about ecological commons like water, climate, food. And then there are our modes of relationship with these ecological commons: we also talk about modes and processes of relationship such as borders, gender, culture. So we don't want to treat ecology as a domain cut off from everything, isolated. This is actually one of the places the "halves" come from too. We aim to explore a little the conversation right there in between — in the modes of relationship between disciplines. And we hope a new output will come from this, something new will emerge. With this mentality, we don't think this is a time to stay separate and isolated any longer.

İlksen: We're in the middle of the 15th Radio Festival, where the motto of all being together prevails. Everything is falling into place in this conversation too, actually.

Seçil: Let's hear the phone number from you. Let's say it together if you'd like, friends. 0212 343 41 41. Please call!

Yasemin: The three of us are friends. We were friends before too. It wouldn't be right to say we came together through the project.

Yasemin: Naturally. And while doing my thesis research I was constantly consulting Serkan and Ayşe about various sources. And it came out of those conversations. I mean, how the visual arts in Turkey have looked at ecological issues, what has happened, what has carried on, what has never been heard or seen. And we continued doing the research together.

İlksen: Is your thesis finished, by the way?

Yasemin: Not yet. There's very little left. Because our research never ends. We keep researching.

Yasemin: We actually touched on this a little earlier: we don't want to use the word "interdisciplinary" either. I mean, it's a word used a lot in art too. Since the subject is ecology and the commons, we prefer to say "indisciplinary". Because we're talking about subjects that are part of all our lives, and vital ones. Saying "interdisciplinary" seems to scatter the subject somehow. It's like saying we brought two separate subjects together. I feel it separates things by itself. Because we're trying to look more holistically, we've tried to use the term "indisciplinary". Indisciplinarity became one of our new framings.

İlksen: That's a new word too. I've started compiling a dictionary of your words here. Even if you claim otherwise, I'm writing it down. Another new word.

Serkan: Let me pick up right there — with indisciplinarity at my back. I worked on environmental topics in academia for a long time. Environmental engineering, then at an environmental sciences institute I found the opportunity to work on environment and ecology again. After that I didn't want to stay only in academia. I wanted to step outside of it, both in terms of ecological topics and in terms of other kinds of production. I actually have an art collective — I'm in another collective at the same time — called oddviz. I live and work with two friends. My connection to art comes from there, actually. And that's where I started thinking about art. And actually when academic production stays only within itself — when it stays within articles and universities, when it's read only by people who read those — I don't think the impact factor is very high. So let me say I think it can be raised further. Because I think we need to go at every platform, every subject a little — that we need to try to make our knowledge, what we share, what we produce heard across very different platforms — I've actually turned a little in this direction too.

İlksen: It seems as if there's a horizontal objective of sorts. Your way of coming together is already like that — from horizontal relationships. And so is your approach to the subject, actually.

Ayşe: Perhaps I can also add something at this point. Here we treat knowledge, too, as a commons. And we stand for the togetherness of knowledge. Knowledge, as Yasemin also said, is not something that can be confined to disciplines. And what we need to do is to acquaint the particles of knowledge trapped in different disciplines with one another, to bring them together.

Seçil: How did you come across Açık Radyo, Serkan?

Serkan: I came to Istanbul in 2008, after finishing my studies in Ankara. And I moved into a completely empty apartment. I had one inflatable mattress. And I had one radio. I had nothing else. I inflated my mattress, turned on the radio, and discovered something that didn't exist in Ankara: Açık Radyo. I've been listening ever since — ten years now. But I didn't stop at listening; there were some cooperative products — almonds, roasted chickpeas, dried mulberries and the like. I took those to Açık Radyo. Bringing this delicious and just food to the radio helped the friendship grow.

Ayşe: I came from Ankara too, in 2013. I can say that I'm not a very good radio listener but I am a very good Açık Radyo listener. In 2014, before the Paris Climate Agreement, before the G20, the meetings where we talked about what could be done in Istanbul, and how, set off a process of connection upstairs at Açık Radyo. I see Açık Radyo as an organisation I care about deeply. We spoke of the togetherness of knowledge, the wholeness of knowledge, knowledge as a commons — I think this genuinely happens at Açık Radyo, it actually takes place. I value spaces like this enormously. I also think we need spaces like this very much.

İlksen: We're certainly passing through such processes, such urgent times. In exactly that sense we're trying to explain the importance of support. 0212 343 41 41.

Yasemin: Honestly I don't remember when, but the exhibitions at Tütün Deposu, the programmes at Açık Radyo, the programmes made by artists or many people from other fields — for years it's been a platform I listen to too.

İlksen: You didn't come from Ankara, did you?

Yasemin: I came from Ankara too.

İlksen: All the stories started that way. Escape from Ankara moments!

Yasemin: Yes, we've been friends with Açık Radyo for a while now. And because we can listen to many different ideas from many different fields and ideas close to our own — especially in today's Turkey — I think it's more valuable than anything. That's why we can all imagine how difficult it is to carry on. So we care about it deeply — we hope it carries on, with people and supporters from every field, and stays on its feet as a platform.

Serkan: Açık Radyo is not only an organisation that produces cultural output. I think it's an organisation that cultivates the people who will produce cultural output. To elaborate a little: in my view, this is a school that produces not poems but poets, not criticism but critics. What does that mean? Açık Radyo doesn't only produce — it teaches production. At least in my own case, on my own scale, that's how it was. So I think the impact of Açık Radyo on the system is large, and I think this impact will multiply. I think it has a locomotive effect, an accelerating effect — because it produces the producer.

Ayşe: It's been learning too, actually, over the years. All together — continuously changing and transforming with you, towards a certain common goal.

Seçil: Thank you very much.

Birbuçuk: Thank you.

Seçil: The birbuçuk collective was with us. We thank all our listeners who have supported us, and those who haven't too. Before we hear the number from you one last time — let's also ask what we'll be listening to on the way out.

Serkan: There's one last track. [Music: The Murlocs — Rolling On]

Seçil: All together: 0212 343 41 41. Please call. You'll see your support repaid.