Our graduate Reyna Akşirin (2022) won the first prize in Istanbul is Yours: Artworks Design Competition for Green Spaces design competition held by the greater municipality of Istanbul. We congratulate our graduate and her team on their success.
The explanation of the project is as follows:
We see communication as the most important condition of social awareness and being together in peace and tranquility. Using our Turkish in accordance with its rules is undoubtedly one of the most important means of establishing healthy communication in these lands. We can write pages of articles on the Turkish language, shoot documentaries and publish books, but we think that these will not be enough in today’s conditions. In recent years, due to various factors, we, as individuals who created the society, have distanced ourselves from each other and divided into classes; We couldn’t laugh and/or cry at the same things. We have almost lost the planes where we can contact each other, our interaction opportunities.
In our opinion, the thing that will ignite the fire of healthy communication is interaction. We started designing with the question “Can a work of art be an interface for interaction as well as representing Atatürk and the Alphabet Revolution?” Our aim is not to make a sculpture that solves these problems; to be together while having fun by using the tools of our language together and discovering its potentials.
The Revolution Inscription reinterprets the universal tradition of inscription commemorative stone and is formed by the combination of several non-identical wall fragments. The system (another piece of wall) designed with the logic of the abacus, consisting of wooden cylinders and steel pipes, connects concrete blocks clustered with different compositions at both ends of this whole. All the letters of our alphabet are placed on each of these wooden cylinders, which can be rotated by hand in a controlled manner. The 4-meter wooden cylindrical wall is open to the use and intervention of the residents of Gülhane Park. Ayşe, who has just started to dismantle literacy, will write “I LOVE YOU FATHER” with these cylinders while she is walking around with her father, Uncle Veli, who is eighty years old next to her, will write “LIVE ATATÜRK” and this wall, where everyone from seven to seventy can coexist and transform.
