DERECE

“Art is what lies between dreams and reality.” -Steve Martin

What will happen after you? “You don’t understand me! When I come to rule as the leader of the partisan’s the whole country has supported me. This will never happen again.” (Tito’s reply to the USA minister of external affairs W. Averell Harriman) “Not because I think that his successors were better but the Tito’s Yugoslavia was just a respiration/breathe. A short hibernation for the massacres, an illusion supported by the western credits, Russian arms and home-made ideological fabrications.” From the article “How do you know Tito?” In his works Mehmet is interested in analyzing the history and making interventions in the way it is presented in the official history books and schoolbooks, constantly being aware of the state apparatus that is behind the creation of the official history. For the trip through the Balkans, he was talking with local people about these issues, until he found old books in Prizren about the Second World War and the Partizan’s involvement between 1943-45. The bo

Re- Locate The theoretical framework of the Re- Locate project is based on the population exchange between Anatolia and the Balkans and it focuses on the flexibility of the borders, cultural similarities, controversies, the lack of communication between cultures, as well as various methods of developing new communication models. In addition, the project aims at establishing a new network between artists, curators, writers and institutions by making the shared history in the selected places its most important guide. This network also intends to form a dialogue between peripheral places, small-scale cultural centers, and artists. Re- Locate Project proposes an experimental workshop practice that is based on mobility and translocation. The suggested mobility tries to en- compass the physical transitivity of the cities and borders, as well as the flexibility of historical, identitarian, and ideological borders. Re- Locate project consists of a series of workshops that are realized in this