SFAQ

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s project The Open School, though it has received little attention, is perhaps one of the most effective knots in this movement of waves between histories and places. It begins as a preoccupation with the re-activation of a space, gathering an archive of books, notes, and objects from the original Greek school at the time of its functioning; the items are displayed in the reading room alongside a number of notebooks in lieu of the original number of students. Islands Speaking has been a cycle of weekly readings held in the room, bringing together a number of languages, speakers, and themes along the shores of islands (Büyüktaşçıyan lives on one of the Prince Islands of Istanbul). Thinking about the island as metaphor for displacement, isolation, insulation, alienation, but also the much-needed shelter of the private domain, intimacy, and inwardness, how does one speak like an island in an archipelago of temporal variations and spatial confusions?