Heerbokelweg tapes
This is a collection of tapes I found in the house on Heerbokelweg, of which my neighbour Idris was moving out in 2020. He gave me the tapes in two boxes that stood next to a plant, a couch, and a bag full of sheeps wool. The collection consists of mixed tapes from radio recordings, prayer songs, tapes by Uzelli records, a Frankfurter shop turned record label, all of them producing a thousand of recordings for guest workers. Artists include Bülent Ersoy, Umit Besen, Ferdi Tayfur, Orhan Gencebay and many more. In 2020 I hosted a weekly radio show at community radio Good Times Bad Times.
Heerbokelwegtapes captures the soundtracks of the guest workers’ everyday life. For this collection of tapes I created several collages posters, zooming into the written notes and names revealing and a publication in which they are archived. For the installation I created a wooden box of 2 meters, where all cassetes are alined and numbered.
Vocabulary of Hospitality: Knock Knock
The presentation at Gemaal op Zuid dissects this complexity that is rendered visible in the urban space. Presentations by Belit Sağ, Merve Bedir, Philippa Driest, Suat ÖğüOgut focus on the term “guest worker.” The Lichtkrant is programmed with sentences/statements on hospitality by Dubravka Sekulić, Banu Cennetoğlu, Marina Otero and others. Vocabulary of Hospitality: Knock Knock is convened by Merve Bedir, and is a desigual to Vocabulary of Hospitality (2015) in Istanbul, which was an investigation into the spatial vocabulary of illegalized migration in Turkey.
...the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated. They have to ask for hospitality in a language which, by definition is not their own, the one imposed on them by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, …This personage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that’s the first act of violence.
Jacques Derrida, of Hospitality