SPARK
SI-009, from issue3, 2022.
It is Chasing Something that is also Undefined
Can Altay is an artist engaged with the politics of everyday life. Incorporating narrative devices and spatial instruments, Can Altay produces “settings” that act as sites of collective production, and open themselves to common use. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as Walker Art Center, PS1 MoMA, ZKM, MAXXI, Van Abbe Museum, SALT; with solo shows in Bolzano, Istanbul, Utrecht, London, Berlin, Bristol. He is also running the podcast ‘Ahali Conversations with Can Altay’ focusing on the future of cultural production; together with artists, designers, and thinkers to imagine a broader understanding of meaning-making.
UDÖ Ahali refers to an unfixed community that doesn’t have boundaries, yet nevertheless produces a meaningful togetherness. What does meaningful togetherness constitute for you?
CA It is chasing something that is also a little bit undefined. However, I can tell you about how it started because it is crucial in understanding how I position Ahali. In the mid-2000s, I was active as an artist in Europe and I was always coming face-to-face with this notion of community practice as a valuable thing in itself. To be honest, community also has oppressive connotations in where I am coming from such as binding rules (depending on which community you belong to whether it’s a cemiyet or a cemaat). Then, you have to act according to the community’s norms. I thought there could be other ways of thinking about community, without regulations, rules of entry, kinship or religion. Ahali came to my rescue. Can a community be much more flexible and open to outsiders while still producing knowledge? Rather than establishing codes of conduct, its knowledge is always in production. I am trying to test that idea in the podcast by talking to practitioners who relate to the cultural production that has a social dimension. At the same time, producing a porous community through the process.
UDÖ Is that why there are always other participants in the room listening while an Ahali conversation is happening?
CA When the pandemic first hit, we suddenly had a lot of time and classes were on a halt. So this was a moment to invite practitioners to my class (which is already an engaged community), but Ahali slowly formed its own community of young and interested artists, curators and designers. Right now, Ahali is an informal network of cultural producers.
UDÖ I noticed that you had a book published by Bradford Press on the idea of ‘Ahali’ around 2013 as well.
CA It was called “Ahali: a Journal for Setting a Setting”. Even though Ahali Journal had a different format, it had a similar drive of bringing people with different practices together. I would invite practitioners to contribute with essays (or visual essays) and each essay would be published as a separate pamphlet. Whenever I would install Ahali Journal, I would display all the pamphlets separately while the reader is free to collect their own publication to be bound with a readymade cover. In the midpoint of these exhibitions, Zak Kyes was running the Architecture Association’s publications. He invited me to publish it in a book format which was really challenging because it was always about this cloud of essays that you can pick and choose and maybe even have a limited access. The book format was a compilation.
UDÖ Maybe the first iteration of the project was that you set a setting that evokes conversations between its makers and its viewers. The assembled journal is the artifact. Right now the audio clip is the artifact of the conversation that is initiated.
CA I also think about how we can turn this into a family of gatherings. Ahali Conversations can keep producing themselves but there are other modes and gatherings where maybe I am not involved that the community initiates.
UDÖ Ahali Conversations feels like an utopia that aims to be decentralized and doesn’t seek a commercial gain.
CA It is not utopian, in a sense that it is dreaming about an unrealizable state which detaches itself from reality. In the Thomas More novel, the origin of the term utopia, they have slaves digging up canals between the rest of the world and utopia. But Ahali imagines ways a conversation can exist while utilizing existing technologies like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. These are still the context these conversations exist in. Perhaps, not an utopia. but more of a Northern Star.
UDÖ We are both from Turkey where cafes and parks will always be full even if the whole economy collapses. Since we come from a culture that puts so much emphasis on conversations, do we have a hunger to establish an Ahali once we leave the country?
CA My very early works were about the Minibar scene, which is people gathering on the streets of Ankara for a nightlife scene in the early 2000s. It was a scene where I was very much a part of, so I was hanging out there but in the meantime I would take photographs and field recordings. These would turn into installations about the scene but also about this notion of occupying urban space. Making space, not physically like building a space, but through gathering. So this has been an interest to me from the very beginning. However, Ahali Conversations was the love-child of two projects: Ahali Journal and another one in IMÇ Çarsısı, Istanbul. Historically, IMÇ was the place in Istanbul where a lot of record labels were in the 70s and 80s but now it is a semi-derelict state. So, we took one of the abandoned spaces and transformed it into an open recording studio. We wanted to offer a space where you can come, play music and be heard. That created its own community around it, as well. Since my class was involved, there were a dozen young designers occupying the space at all times. Eventually, I started inviting people to have conversations in our studio space. One of them became a radio show, others reflected on alternative popular music in Istanbul.
UDÖ I am interested in organically forming a community. How does a teacher start a space that culminates in a community?
CA I did a similar recording studio in the UK a year ago but it only consisted of me, a curator and a sound engineer. I had an urge to do it more collectively in Istanbul and my class had a good synergy that semester. We designed together, scouted materials together, built together. As the building had a lot of carpet dealers, their leftover materials became our sound insulation. Then, we started letting people know through newspaper advertisements, flyers, Facebook, word-of-mouth, you name it (...). If you are a musician, recording something outside of your bedroom for free is very attractive too. There was even a bit of proactive recruitment in which we invited Tahribat-i Isyan -the rappers from Sulukule- to do a workshop session in which they brought younger generation rappers to the studio. At one point, there were rappers freestyling while others played Saz. Love stories emerged: one of the musicians started dating the sound engineer which is the most beautiful part of doing such projects. If we were to call this an art project, we wouldn’t have this abundance of interest.
UDÖ Maybe we should forget about art altogether and just focus on music to bring people together.
CA But also think about the offerings of sound. When I record a conversation and publish it as a podcast, anyone who knows English and has access to the Internet can listen and be a part of the knowledge domain.
CA Every time I listen back to my own recorded conversations, something else attracts my attention. But, I also understand how formative they were to my life and my artistic practice. If these published conversations achieve even a minute portion of that feeling in others, it is successful. That’s the whole idea of culture production. It’s always ongoing, stacking and cross-pollinating.
UDÖ In your conversation with Metahaven in Ahali, you mention that you refer to yourself more as an essayist. How do you go yourself between facets of your practice?
CA It was a question that I kept facing when I was a younger artist. But I like the word ‘essay’ (essai) because it comes from the word essayer in French which means trying out or testing. So everything I do is an essay. Or, if I frame the work I do as essays, I am freed from what it achieves but also what form it embodies.
Follow Ahali Conversations here
interview by Utkan Dora Öncül
Spark Interview-009