Diyarbakır
Hub IWords Written on the Water

Phase 1

“Words Written on the Water” included preparatory productions of an art, culture and nature festival, with artists and initiatives from Diyarbakır and different geographies, aiming to have a place in the urban memory of Diyarbakır and to carry Kurdish language, culture and art out into the world. 

Initiated with VAHA programme, the festival aims to enmesh the VAHA ecosystem to the Kurdish artistic and cultural ecosystem and to produce inter-spatial, inter-communal and inter-disciplinary artistic interlacements for a porous artistic expression. FeqîFest is the dream of a festival where the voices of all the diverse identities of human history intermingle with living and non-living voices of the earth. Through the words of Feqî written on the water, rolling into the poetic flow of coexistence, the festival strives to shake given meanings of the clichés. While the loss interfolds with the presence, only the artistic expression bodies forth the meshwork hidden in the spot. Down from Fiskaya to the Hevsel Gardens, a telluric voice roams the city spot by spot to spread the word farthest. Dare to hear it then it will tell you.

In this crone world, you move from spot to spot
You neither sleep nor do you ever come to a halt
In all honesty, you are the very image of my heart
You suffer and agonize, you are deep in misery

Phase 2

Concrete Contract

in collaboration with Athens and Tirana hubs

The sea is history.
The unity is submarine.

“Concrete Contract” is a collaboration project between Diyarbakır, Athens and Tirana hubs, trying to build an artistic relational context across places, people and their related aspirations about the concrete and concretisation of their surroundings. Looking at different sorts of nation-building processes, the making of places of belonging and identities, and the neoliberal global capitalism that both enforce and challenge the former two, the project searches for artistic and collaborative variations and mutations of the literary and visual representations of the concrete to challenge the multidirectional and all-encompassing material groundedness of the concrete and its homogenizing effects in our shared and identical spaces. Inspired by Caribbean writers, challenging the colonial history and looking for ways of reclaiming the land and the identity in its all multiplicity, the project title looks for different sorts of alignments of joy and care through artistic expression, between different histories, spaces, people, objects and discourses, challenging an imagined giant concrete construction. Opposing the “national” contracts written on the peoples of different pasts, the concrete contract works to find out what kind of multiplicities lie beneath the homogenised concrete surface, looking for creative archaeologies and shaking the ground of foundations of all kinds, handing in irony and improvisation. It’s a contract to look for ways of relations to enjoy the submarine.