Turkish Pavilion

Challenging the increasing confinement within borders of religion, language, race, nationality, ethnicity and gender, Bastarda is a 30 meters long vessel that links metaforically Istanbul and Venice.

Darzanà is a project about frontier infringement and on hybridity. Curated by Feride Çiçekoğlu, Mehmet Kütükçüoğlu and Ertuğ Uçar, with curatorial collaborators Cemal Emden and Namık Erkal, the Pavilion is located at the Sale d’Armi, Arsenale, and coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).

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 including wooden moulds, discarded furniture, signboards and boats.

The Pavilion of Turkey 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 Biennale Architettura 2016, a last vessel, Bastarda, 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. Similar to Darzanà, Bastarda is also a hybrid word. As a symbol of Mediterranean hybridity, Bastarda creates a bridge between the two shipyards, one left to rot away in the megacity of Istanbul, the other springing to life only at certain times of the year in the museum-city that is Venice.

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.