Oda Projesi moved temporarily to Çatı Dance Studio
(web site is still under construction…)
Oda Projesi is an artist collective based in Istanbul. It is composed of three members; Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel who turned their collaboration into an art project in 2000. The project members had met in 1997 and decided to rent and share an apartment as a private studio in Galata. After 3 years when their flat was sold and they needed to leave, their neighbours told them about the empty flat in the courtyard, they moved there in 2000. Although not intendedly, the new apartment they rented in Galata started to be evolved into a multi-purpose, and public space, with a shift in the usual role of the audience in the contemporary art scene. Özge Açıkkol was the first to open the privacy of the apartment to the public, with her project “About a Useless Space”. She emptied out the middle room with the text of Georges Perec and turned it into a space open to intervention. Hence Oda Projesi space opened on January 22nd, 2000, soon after the first project, the apartment became a gathering place not only for other artists, architects, sociologists, musicians, but mainly for the neighbours. This 45 square-meters space in Galata functioned as a non-profit space with zero budget, hosting nearly 30 projects, up until 2005, when Oda Projesi was evicted from the apartment due to the process of gentrification increasingly penetrating the neighborhood. Oda Projesi space had to close on March 16th, 2005. Before moving from the space, a collaboration with the artist Matthieu Prat lead to a radio project in the neighbourhood. The real physical space of Oda Projesi has turned out to be a non visible but existing space with the tool of the radio. Since then Oda Projesi has a mobile status and continues to raise questions by using different mediums and different spaces like a local radio station, a book, postcards, newspapers or giving form to different meeting points.
Since 2000, Oda has been experimenting with alternative ways of using and producing space, by either creating “the collective game” or trying to find it in the already existent daily life. In addition to the production of space, there is the production of an other language, or rather, a set of new languages. This is all intentional: an intention to be present in a neighborhood and in a city, and to be aware of the fact that all of us are “neighbors”.