Mediation and Inspiration

On mid-December 2025, Fatma Belkıs Işık from NGO Hür Adalar joined DRAMA 2 in St. Erme, France. It was a gathering on mediation and accountability in self-organized environments, organized by Performing Arts Forum (Pa-f).

In her own words, Fatma Belkıs shares her thoughts on this visit:

I arrived in St Erme on the last train. I joined Performing Arts Forum telegram group before coming here. I was receiving messages on trains and pick-ups. I decided to give myself time, go by myself and read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad on the way.

I learned about Pa-f from someone I went to grad school with 8 years ago. I was told the building was a convent once. It is a space initiated by artists and academics for artists, researchers and practitioners in the field of performing and visual arts. She told me there were some rules:

Don’t leave traces.
Make it possible (for others).
The do-er decides.
Mind assymetries.

For eight years from time to time I wanted to go visit Pa-f and participate in the programs organized by the community there (such as Summer University, Winter Update Meeting and Spring Meeting). I either didn’t have time or the resources to go until now. When I got the newsletter announcing there would be a meeting on mediation called DRAMA, I thought this might be the right time. DRAMA is organized by the Pa-f mediation working group, a group of volunteers who care about community accountability and mediation at Pa-f and in artist communities in general. 

I found myself at Pa-f late at night, exhausted by the trip. So I found a room for myself immediately and went to sleep to meet the DRAMA group next morning at 10 o’clock. In the first orientation I came to understand that even though this meeting centered around how mediation should be regulated at Pa-f, because people attending had backgrounds in collectives and collaborative production, other contexts for mediation seeped in inevitably.

This 2nd DRAMA meeting had some facilitated sessions by Organizing Otherwise from Berlin. One of these meetings was on the Glasl diagram of conflict escalation. We splited into groups reading and discussing the stages in the diagram then presenting them to the group. One of the interesting outcomes of this exercise is seeing how everyone saw the conflict that they are going through worse than it actually falls under the chart. 

Other meetings involved sharing experiences of conflict resolution and mediation from our respective groups. We also tried out a puppetry as mediation workshop and one of the puppets produced served as a talking stick the rest of the week. 

Pa-f adopts a self- governing collective structure meaning that it is not a board that decides what happens. It’s the people who take responsibility of the space as many as they might be. In years Pa-f has been in operation, people who take care of the space took on certain titles. The ones who deal with the day-to-day operations (checking in, payments, in-house communications) are the octopi and the ones who deal with the big picture stuff (booking, insurance, mediation, repairs) are the firefiles. 

On one of the last days of the DRAMA meeting, 3 of the fireflies joined us for a meeting to give a presentation on their projection on mediation at Pa-f. departing from their presentation and our workshop a potential proposal for a mediation method is drafted. 

Pa-f being a transitional collective community, encourages you the residents to take turns in cooking lunch and dinner and all the residents at Pa-f at the time joins in the cleaning performance which takes place every sunday, where everybody takes responsibility of one cleaning chore so that the space is maintained collectively.

From Pa-f I took a train to Paris where I stayed for a week. I had tickets to two dance shows at Chaillot, to a theater play, Pétrole, at Odéon and and to a performance, The Work a part of Festival d’Automne. I was also planning on seeing some exhibitions.

The first show I went to was at Fondation Louis Vuitton. The main exhibition was a Gerard Richter retrospective and my favorite painting in this extensive selection was an earlier work of his, a portrait of his daughter, Betty 1977. On the same day I was able to see Echo, Delay, Reverb at Palais de Tokyo on influence of French theorists on artists from North America. A George Condo and Otobong Nkanga retrospective was Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, right next to Palais de Tokyo, so I was able to see that as well.

I spent 3 months in Paris for an artist residency in 2023. During that time I had the chance to study the tapestry series, The Lady and The Unicorn at Musée de Cluny. I worked on my solo show at the time partly inspired by the imagery of the unicorn and the specific depiction of the unicorn in this work. Thanks to this trip to Paris, I was able to see them again and write about it a little bit more.

One of the exhibitions at Bourse de Commerce had a number or artists from North America as well, one of them being Felix Gonzalez Torres. Interestingly the same work of his was on display both on Palais de Tokyo and Bourse de Commerce.

Other significant shows were The Relief by Tarik Kiswanson at Institut Suedois on an anecdote from WW2, a Raymond Pettibon retrospective at Picasso Museum and the mail art exhibition at Immenance.

I found myself in Paris, this time again, while contemplating a new work. Silvain Creuzevault’s adaptation of Pasolini’s Pétrole provided the spark that I needed at the time. The majority of the play took place in a container that was filmed and live-streamed to the audience. Along with The Work by Susanne Kennedy, which starts off with an interview with an artist and takes place in a multimedia installation, I believe I was able to leave Paris with a lot to think about.