Darzanà: Two Arsenals, One Vessel

The Pavilion of Turkey at the 15th Venice International Architecture Biennale features the project Darzanà. Curated by Feride Çiçekoğlu, Mehmet Kütükçüoğlu and Ertuğ Uçar, with curatorial collaborators Cemal Emden and Namık Erkal, the exhibition team of Darzanà consists of Hüner Aldemir, Caner Bilgin, Hande Ciğerli, Gökçen Erkılıç, Nazlı Tümerdem and Yiğit Yalgın. The Pavilion of Turkey, coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and co-sponsored by Schüco Turkey and VitrA, is located at the Sale d’Armi, Arsenale.

Darzanà is a project about frontier infringement and on hybridity. It challenges the increasing confinement within borders of religion, language, race, nationality, ethnicity and gender. The project highlights the common cultural and architectural heritage shared between the arsenals of Istanbul and Venice. For the Architecture Biennale 2016, a last vessel, “Baştarda,” has been constructed out of abandoned materials found in the old dockyard of Istanbul and transported to Venice to suggest a new connection in Mediterranean.

Despite their very different identities and populations today, Venice and Istanbul once both featured considerable dockyards of similar sizes and production. The common core of these dockyards was the shipsheds called “volti” in Italian and “göz” in Turkish. The shipshed is the building block of a shared architectural heritage; its proportions grow out of the dimensions of boats and of common building technologies. Darzanà links a shipshed of Istanbul with a shipshed of Venice by a vessel. For the project Darzanà, a last vessel, “Baştarda” was built earlier this year at an abandoned shipshed at the Haliç dockyards in Istanbul.

In Istanbul, “Baştarda” was constructed beneath a reproduction of the wooden trusses of the hall in Sale d’Armi of Venice shipyard that hosts the Pavilion of Turkey. Measuring 30 metres long and weighing four tons, the vessel was built from more than 500 pieces, including seven kilometres of steel cable and abandoned materials found on site such as wooden moulds, discarded furniture, signboards and boats. In April, the components were shipped to Sale d’Armi, where “Baştarda” was re-constructed in May for the Pavilion of Turkey. When the Biennale closes in November 2016, “Baştarda” will continue her journey and she will eventually become the centrepiece of a museum of the arsenal, when the site is opened to public in Istanbul.

Darzanà’s main theme raises the question of whether it is possible to transform borders, fronts and other spaces of conflict into thresholds and spaces of consensus. In this vein, “Baştarda” becomes a vessel of frontier infringement. She came to Venice, and she will eventually go back to Istanbul, travelling back and forth, just as the languages, the architectural forms, and people of the Mediterranean, have done throughout history. Reporting from Darzanà, one can announce the futility of demarcations on the seas and in between the words.

A book has been published to accompany the project Darzanà, which makes use of different archive materials to narrate the history of the dockyards in Haliç from their first creation through to their golden ages right up to recent times when they eventually became unusable. Edited by Feride Çiçekoğlu and featuring texts by Namık Erkal and Vera Costantini and photographs by Cemal Emden, the book is available in two editions, English and Turkish, at the opening of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and will later be distributed by Yapı Kredi Publications in selected bookstores. The book and the exhibition’s visual identity are designed by Bülent Erkmen. The tote bag designed for the project by Hüner Aldemir features sail making details and is made out of repurposed sailcloth.

For further information: www.iksv.org

For press images: www.iksvphoto.com

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Elif Obdan Gürkan – Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV)
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