Written by Bengisu Köse
Project: "Mey'le" - Gizem Erbilgin
Ters-Yüz: Re-thinking the potentials was realised at the santralistanbul campus on 28 May – 16 August 2019. The exhibition, which featured the senior design projects of Department of Industrial Design students at Istanbul Bilgi University, invited designers and users to reconsider the relationships they form in a social, cultural, and economic context. Six students who took the course titled IND 324 Design Writing and Editorship wrote about six projects from the exhibition.
The relationship between the pieces and projects coincides with one of the aims of the Istanbul Design Biennial, which is forming a space of constant learning and reflection. In order to encourage young people to reflect upon issues that revolve around design, the IDB will be publishing these six pieces every week.
The first piece of the series is “Evolving Cultures” by Bengisu Köse.
Long, long ago, in an Anatolian village far away, a family came together every night for dinner. They shared all the food they put on the table and no one saved anything for themselves. This way they would share not only their food, but their souls too.
Years later, today, in Istanbul, we can still see the food sharing culture on our tables. In their homes, out on the street, on a raki table, people are still sharing their food, their conversations, their feelings and ideas, their souls. At least Gizem Erbilgin, creator of Mey’le, seems to think so.
Gizem was inspired by this old Anatolian tradition and sought to adapt it to our day by reinterpreting the raki table. To do so, she changed the forms of the plates used in raki tables, creating forms that do not take much space and that leave customisable spaces on the table. She imagined these spaces can be used for cutlery, glasses, and other plates. Is it possible to intervene with something that is so obviously and deeply etched in our lives such as shared food culture, intervene with raki tables, which are the same everywhere? Or is it even right to do so? Studying Gizem’s design process made these answers clear for me.
I wanted to review this project because it deals with a very traditional and sociological issue, and addresses a popular concept of today as well, ‘sharing’. Upon viewing the greater framework of the project, which emerges from a cultural point and primarily deals with form, some questions I had about the possible contributions of the project to the art scene was clarified.
I have previously mentioned the project is derived from the shared dinner table culture in villages. In villages, people used to eat from the same cup so that there would be less dirty dishes. People who put the food on the table would inadvertently direct people to eat from the same cup, encouraging them to share. One other example of this is the use of shared courtyards in Turkish architecture. Architects would design houses in a way that would direct people to a common space so that the building allows sharing of social lives. Today, the culture of gathering at the courtyard manifests itself in different ways like the living rooms in homes or co-working spaces. Kolektif House Levent is a good example of this in Istanbul. The main meeting space that acts as the courtyard brings the people working in the building together. There, a culture, which is thought to have fixed utilisation and design decisions, is evolved to be carried on.
To explain how culture benefits from this state of evolution, one can refer to Dana Douiev’s Injera collection. Dana rendered Ethiopia’s cooking culture to our day and managed to present a culture that perhaps we have not yet met or made the effort to get familiar, as a topic of interest, and put it on the map.
At this point, rather than questioning the contribution of design in culture, I think that designs like these play a saviour’s role. Today’s desire for fast paced consumption rips many cultures apart from our world, destroying them. Traditional sieve making and basketry can be named as examples of this loss. Not many artisans are left producing these, since now everything is mass produced, distributed, and sold. By extension, it is possible to say that designs like these seriously contribute to culture.
Mechanization is one of the greatest culprits of the death of culture. Machine language can globalise everything and destroy the ‘special’ in everything. Douiev and like-minded designers are the biggest defensive weapons against this. They analyse and combine both traditional and contemporary culture, building ‘peace’ among them. We can place Gizem within this group of designers. Raki table culture is very strong and can be hard to destroy. We cannot know what is going to happen to it a century later but we can foresee some possibilities. Even though Gizem addresses the issue technically as a ‘raki table setting’, I think these designs can be a significant method for preserving our culture.
