AmALAN

Event series and gathering programs / Berlin / initiated with Dilsad Aladag

ALAN #0
October 21, 7pm
Reading Performance & Installation

Am Tempelhofer Berg 7A, Berlin

Dilsad Aladag says:

On my last visit to Turkey, I found a handwritten diary of my grandfather, who as a “Gastarbeiter” in Germany from 1968 to 1978.

In these and many other notebooks, my grandfather, a primary school graduate, recorded his days working in Çukurova, the autumn in Stuttgart when he questioned his existence in a park near the factory, his longing mixed with a nationalist desire, the smell of pine as he climbed the Taurus Mountains, the way he recalled a memory from the Alps in those mountains, the literary magazine he read on the village bus, his questions about when to write poetry.A year after we first met, I wanted to honour his desire to write, which I thought came from a very sincere place. Especially the new generation of the Turkish diaspora, who travel similar roads and struggle with similar emotions, would hear his notes on the relationship between the land and the two geographies.

The diaries of my immigrant grandfather met with a new generation of the diaspora who, like me, left Turkey and moved to Europe in the 2010s at in-house reading meetings organized in Berlin. The installation accompanying the reading performance provided a bird's eye view of the landscapes in the recordings, allowing the audience to produce their own experiences after the performance.

stills from the installation, 2022

Dilşad Aladağ
Reading Performance & Installation
Dilşad Aladağ (1993, Adana) is a researcher living in Berlin and Istanbul, trained as an architect and practising artistic andcritical forms in various fields. She has worked on architectural, artistic and curatorial projects and has been involved inarthouse film productions. She is co-founder of the urban collective Plankton Project and the artistic research collective TheGarden of (not) Forgetting, both of which have been presented on international platforms. Her current work addresses thepossibilities of resilience that cultural and artistic practices can create in the face of new cultural and environmental problems.