“IDENTITY AND TERRITORY” WTH ARTIST ANDRES MONTES

Newspiece by: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Deniz HASIRCI, Department Head, Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey

Every year, we at our department, celebrate World Interiors Day in a different way, under the titles Talking Interiors and Access Interiors, ranging from technical trips around quality interiors within the city, talks on interiors, trips to factories or workshops.

This past week we completed a wonderful workshop with department and Maquis Projects guest, artist Andres Montes on Identity and Territory. Our students had a great time discussing the meanings and values we give to places around the city and on campus. What a great way to celebrate World Interiors Day!

Montes worked with our students for 3 days on a project titled, “All the Territories Possible”, and delivered a talk on places, territories, politics of space, and meanings we give to spaces. The workshop and talk explanations below.

He also opened an exhibition at Maquis Projects run by department member and lecturer Thomas Keogh, displaying new work produced here in Izmir, titled Dogma Dogma on Turkish media, flags, and ownership of land and space.

We thank Keogh for making this wonderful connection between our department and Montes, and organizing the event, and Andres Montes for his valuable contributions to our department. World Interiors Day is a wonderful opportunity to create awareness on interiors, how we use space, our behavior in space, definitions of space and place, and the meanings and values we give to spaces. Every year, we try to discuss these issues related to the theme and enable our students and community to experience the celebration of our profession.

WORKSHOP TITLE: ALL THE TERRITORIES POSSIBLE

A workshop on the mapping of potential places.

“Space, be it public or private, is before anything, a practiced terrain that is constituted in action, with individuals and their movements giving it meaning (…)”

José Miguel G. Cortés

Among our defining traits we find the tendency to construct places, places to call our own. We do this by working within space enabling regions of action: receptacles of objects and values that govern our exchanges. This political negotiation with space and others extends territory, and it is immersed in this network of reciprocity that we come upon meaning, triggered by the presence of an object or intention.

This workshop intends to investigate the processes involved in the creation of territory and its relation to memory and identity, it is proposed as an investigation of our relationship with space and its politization. I'm looking forward to discovering our personal maps together. -Andres Montes, World Interiors Day, 2016

We thank dear Andres Montes for his great energy and for working with our students, Tom Keogh for organizing the whole event, and our students who participated in the workshop producing wonderful results, and thinking about space and place. Just what the IFI theme of this year suggests: Interiors Intelligence.

We organized the Interiors Experience meeting last month and were together with IFI president Sebastiano Raneri and past president Iris Dunbar, Chamber of Interior Architects- İzmir Branch celebrating the signing of the IFI Declaration. Next week we will be at the Chamber of Interior Architects' Sectoral Meeting with our department's stand. It has been a fantastic semester and academic year in which we celebrated our profession with colleagues, students, and friends. Let's all keep raising awareness on what we do. This is essential.

Happy World Interiors Day!

Good luck in the Finals period...

Best regards,
DH