I mentioned it in my last post, but now it is about to start after we were working on the preparations in the last two days. Pecs2010chairs is a project in Pecs, Hungary, a temporary invasion into public spaces. For the next days 2010 chairs will invade into public spaces and will create new points of view and possibilities to see and use your public spaces. The project will move through different squares in the city and invade into the normal spaces, creating border, possibilities and new ideas. Thousands of single pieces moved around by everyone who would like to. How will people react and act?

This is what the project designers wrote:

Take a seat, be a part.

What looks like a furniture, can have a powerful impact on a city when they appear in masses:  An Invasion of 2010 Chairs. Temporarily, six public spaces will be invaded by chairs one after another along the new cultural path. The movement of chairs creates a symbolic bridge between the Main Square and the revitalized Zsolnay Cultural Quarter – the yet unexplored space of Pécs. Bizarre impressions shall express the potential of public spaces for inhabitants of Pécs – not only for the duration of 1 week, but beyond. You are invited to participate in this social experiment with artistic   and musical performances.

My assignment here is to document the project. But after the classic negotiations (‘We need a short video clip and some pictures for press.’) we developed the idea to try out an internet experiment in the soul of the project, an interactive website that will be developed over the process of the week. With the project moving every day the website will bring up new features, short films, interviews, pictures… The trick is that the project is developing in a linear way, so with a classic storyline, from square to square. There are events planned, but the rest is up to the people who interact with the 2010 chairs. They could do everything with it. And from this idea we will also allow the user to choose the parts of the story that are interesting to him – for every square but also for the whole website at the end. During the process we will add an extra navigation that will allow the user to break out of the linear line from square to square and search for the parts he/she is interested in.

I’m very excited about it as it combines a lot of different things that are pretty straight forward. I’m getting up in the morning right now, start shooting, get back to the Hotel and start converting, checking pictures followed by the editing of the videos and then it’s up to program the site for the day. It is also the attempt to show that interactive features don’t have to be big flash productions, but are also possible with basic html and a clear concept – to be executed in a short amount of time and with small budgets. It’s an exciting journey and I’m more than happy to see where it goes.

Follow us on our journey and get to know Pecs a bit, day by day… Check it out here.

What you see on the picture below is the poor rest of Sulukule, one of the neighborhoods with the longest history in Istanbul (some even consider it older than the city itself.). It was home of Roma community for hundreds of years. After a long fight to save this quarter it is lost now to a ‘gentrification’ project and the Roma were moved to outside neighborhoods. Sulukule was once famous for it’s music, culture and art.

One of the interesting things you could see on the picture are the metal fences that go through the whole area. There are likely three or four houses were still people live. You go through this long corridors to reach them and i can’t help but having this feeling of being in or outside a prison. Long walls, where you can’t look behind.

Istanbul is a city on the move in many ways and being the European Cultural Capital 2010 (with a budget around 500 million euros) might have paced up some processes even when no one really could tell me, where that is. “We have so many events here all the time that you can’t see a difference when there are some in the name of the Cultural Capital.”, one of the students from the project i was documenting the last days said. But at least it seems to me that many projects on the line and in the planning for a long time got through the Cultural Capital at least an extra push. And maybe it is not a surprise that Sulukule was finally poured down at the beginning of the year.

It is always a difficult conflict city-planning is in, keeping the old, the history, the culture, but at the same time modernize. For a long time (and still happening everywhere..) city-planning focused on creating something people afterwards can connect with. Nowadays participation is the way how to do it many say. But also here you have to get people together and actually talk about it. A process what i was told is hardly working in Istanbul.

In Sulukule no one asked the Roma families. And the Roma culture as in many other countries, seemed to be not something worth saving or keeping alive. One of the problems i was told is in this case also not only the rude city-planning that just planned to re-build the whole neighborhood, but also the lobby of the Roma that was weak. Part of the Roma are integrated fully into the islamic culture and consider themselves as such, the other part not, what makes the inner communication more difficult i was told.

In any way it maybe was a fight hard to win against financial interests, a strong islamic community that should become a new center there. We have seen things like that happening all over the world but the people without a voice, the poor and weak are the ones that lose at the end, no matter if it is in Mumbai, Nairobi or here in Istanbul. But here it is beside that also a culture slowly getting destroyed.

Some of the Roma families already came back to Sulukule, now living hidden in the ruins. The main reason is that they can’t afford the new houses they were moved to or the way into the city is to long.

Sidenote: I had planned to work on a little story on that, while i was in Istanbul, but my main assignment kept me busy so that i only had the chance to visit it once and talk to people there and some city planners i was working with on another project this week. So no pictures, but maybe this little insight gave you a glimpse of the story, even when there would be way more to write about it. If you are interested in more, check Ciara Lemming, who was attending the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop the week before and worked on a story about a Roma family. You can find her pictures here.

UPDATE: Ciara made a new tight edit of her work from Istanbul. You can find it here, also downloadable as a pdf. Great stuff!