As with so many major cultural events, the Istanbul Design Biennial faced an existential crisis with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. What is a biennial without openings, galas, gatherings, panel discussions and international travel? For a design biennial, the question was even more profound. Who, ultimately is the audience of such an event? For whom is it staged? Rather than postpone, as so many other large art world events chose to do, the Istanbul Design Biennial, under the curatorship of Mariana Pestana, chose to address these questions directly.
Text by Billie Muraben
The fifth Istanbul Design Biennial, which runs until April 2021, brings together ideas and projects that seek to define a new role for design based on empathy. The discipline is presented as a mediator of emotions and feelings, a practice that takes care as its main purpose, connecting us with one another, and with the world around us, such as other species, microorganisms, soil, water and the universe.
Biennials are events that concentrate people in one place and often involve the transport of often recently produced pieces across countries and continents. Rather than ignoring the current scenario, the event, entitled Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one, has adapted to it. The constantly shifting challenges require a flexible structure that’s long and slow, which can pause or gather pace, rather than resist its circumstances. The fifth Istanbul Design Biennial completely rethinks this model and asks: what would a biennial be with less transport and travel? What if, instead of showing existing work, it promoted the making of new works and new research threads? The result is a biennial that is generative and locally produced, an opportunity to begin new projects in dialogue with, and that cater for, the citizens of Istanbul.
Interested in the balance that can, and needs to be achieved, in working with and for local communities, without losing sight of – and empathy for – our wider world, the programme is focused on four meaningfully rooted core strands. The first, New Civic Rituals, is a series of interventions that rehearse new kinds of encounters, hosted by specific community groups at sites around Istanbul. From communal cooking to gardens and playgrounds, they aim to have a restorative effect, while facilitating experiences of reconnection and care for the city and its inhabitants. A second strand, the Library of Land and Sea is an educational space that invites visitors to rethink the concept of the Mediterranean by looking at our relationship with land and sea. It contains a collection of research projects by designers and thinkers currently mapping and building new tools and reflections for social, economic and environmental resilience in the region. Empathy Sessions, meanwhile, is a selection of film works that expand the notion of empathy by inviting viewers to take on a diversity of perspectives – of water, a tortoise, or even bacteria – so as to explore a multitude of spaces in the digital realm from inside the earth to the deep ocean. Finally, the Critical Cooking Show is a digital programme of films that reimagine the kitchen as a space central to design thinking and production. It explores how food exchange, preparation and consumption relate to urgent ecological, economic and geopolitical conditions that are having an impact on contemporary culture – told from specific perspectives from within particular communities and neighbourhoods.
All these research projects, films and public commissions, which are installed in Istanbul and screening online, are diverse in theme and form, but share a common intention to destabilise familiar hierarchies and shift dominant perspectives. They embody an expanded sense of place, take in connections across scales and challenge the notion of the human as “protagonist”. ◉
Opposite and previous, The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism by Dele Adeyemo, is a design-led investigation that recovers the long-neglected histories that narrate how the Mediterranean world was extended to the coast of Guinea, and the relations of power forged in the integrated networks of sugar-cane plantations. By acting as prototypes for later practices of colonisation, industrial agricultural production and Atlantic slavery, Europe’s sugar-cane plantations in its global colonies would propel the expansion of capitalism across the planet, transforming notions of race in the process.
Your Mouth has Power by MOLD and Yardy World, is a collective message from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about food sovereignty, resilience and culture during this precarious period of both pandemic and revolution. The film constructs a narrative about place and participation through a series of vignettes, while challenging the conventions of cooking shows by using black pop culture and historic references as moments of friction against how we understand imagery and viewership.
Opposite, Point Cloud by object design and art studio Soft Baroque, is a set of furniture pieces inspired by the point clouds created when machines “read” reality. Installed on Beşiktaş Pier, they invite you to consider how the world looks from the “eyes” of a machine and also to imagine a future automated scenario in which designs are created without human input. In this future, will machines create designs for their own pleasure?
Artist and filmmaker Calum Bowden’s Dark Origins is a virtual-reality journey to the edge of knowledge, inviting people to experience the contested origins of life deep inside the Earth. The story shifts between human, bacterial, geological and machinic perspectives to unravel the scientific mysteries of extremophiles – creatures that thrive without any sunlight at the most hostiles temperatures and pressures. These organisms could hold the key to resituating human life in the universe.
Büyükada Songlines by Studio Ossidiana, is a nomadic pavilion, a floating garden inhabited by plants, soils, insects and birds, travelling between the Princes’ Islands – an archipelago just off Istanbul – and the Golden Horn. It will be installed in the spring. Drawing on a tradition of water pavilions that bind cities across Europe and Asia, Büyükada Songlines is an investigation of our complex relationships with other species: from the horses and the horse masters of Büyükada, to the transplanted corals of Tavşan Adası. The garden collects stories and species, in the process becoming a living embassy of the archipelago and its complex ecologies.
In As Above, So Below, a film by architect Mariana Sanchez Salvador and artist and architect Rain Wu, food is tracked from past to present and into the future, and from the micro to the macro scale – the meal, the settlement, the landscape, the cosmos, down to the microbial and viral in our guts and in the air – and in the process, unveils a new perspective on our world.
Opposite, The Sobya’t Thawra or Revolution Woodstove, by architecture practice Bits to Atoms and design collective Beirut Makers, was designed as a simple contribution to the resistance, to provide warmth, tea and coffee to protesters in Lebanon, in October 2019. Manufactured in steel using a design from an open-source CAD file, the stove is easy to reproduce, hardy, and functions in rainy weather. Installed at Karaköy Pier, Istanbul, hosted by Urban.koop, the stove is being used by local tea sellers and fishermen, and will be the site of talks and discussions over the next few months, as it settles into its permanent home on the waterfront.
