The Chamber of Architects Kayseri Branch has been organizing the Kayseri Architecture Festival since 2022, and the third edition will take place in Kayseri, Türkiye, on October 3-5, 2024, with the theme "Retell the Story". This year, the festival is curated by Sevince Bayrak from SO? Architecture and Ideas, who co-curated the Turkish Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial, where they presented their project, The Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture: Ghost Stories. The festival's theme, 'Retell the Story,' which she proposed, builds on their recent research, broadening the focus from adaptive reuse to retelling architectural narratives from diverse perspectives. The event will feature both local and international speakers, including Christele Harrouk, Editor-in-Chief of ArchDaily. Other notable speakers include Ahmet Sezgin, Cem Sorguç, Chen-Yu Chiu, Elif Çelik, Hayriye Sözen, Kadir Uyanık, Kim Seunghoy, Melis Cankara, Melis Varkal, Merve Gedik, Mucip Ürger, Nevzat Sayın, Zeynep Eres, and Zeynep Hagur, who will share their insights on retelling the stories of built and unbuilt environments.
The festival will take place at the Maintenance and Repair Workshops of Abdullah Gül University's Sumer Campus, a former factory repurposed into a state university.
Sevince Bayrak, the curator of the festival, explains the theme of the festival as below.
RETELL THE STORY
"No work is born into a void; it is added to the flowing river,' says Nurdan Gürbilek. The flowing river is filled with words, images, and buildings, roads, and bridges; if we retell the story there is room for all of them.
Whether the story is told through images or words, it is part of daily life. Not just today, as we fill every moment with stories with the help of technology, but ever since we discovered the first tools for storytelling, we haven't spent a day without stories. First, we listen to the stories of others, then we make up our own. The stories told before us influence what we will tell. Who tells the story is as important as the story itself. From whose perspective are we looking at the plot? Which heroes' voices are loud, and which ones do we not hear at all? Retelling a story opens the door for imagining even the most familiar myths, those believed to be absolute truths, in a different way, and for bringing new heroes forward.
Today, stories from mythology to history, from technology to medicine, are being retold, and architecture is also part of this. Instead of building from scratch every time, transforming what already exists, giving buildings new life; improving cities with small-scale interventions rather than mega-projects, and seeing architecture as a collective effort are more relevant than ever. Moreover, this is not a matter of arbitrary choice, but a way out during a time when economic, environmental, and social crises are intertwined. Stories are being reconstructed with new perspectives and methods to create hopeful narratives.
The purpose of retelling is not to repeat what we already know or to create something entirely new. It is to learn details we haven't heard before, to discover characters we didn't know, to say 'what if it was like this instead of that,' and to see the photographs taken from the angles we hadn't seen. We need to retell the flowing river, along with what is born into it, in order to reveal the ups and downs that every work inevitably goes through.
Title
III. Kayseri Architecture FestivalType
EventOrganizers
From
October 03, 2024 04:00 PMUntil
October 05, 2024 09:30 PMVenue
Kayseri, TürkiyeAddress