Slobodan Dan Paich created Resonance Istanbul in 2020 as a Celebrating Incubation Process Initiative. He came up with this idea in a turning point in his life as well as in the lives of many who were working with him.
In early 2020 when the global pandemic of Covid-19 hit, Slobodan had to reconsider his way of working for two reasons. Firstly, because of people's current need to find a new paradigm of getting and working together, secondly his long term collaborator, halka art project's losing its lease in Istanbul.
His new approach was based on this premise: Personal and communal art incubation processes are rarely celebrated, explored and acknowledged. Resonance Istanbul Initiative is convened to include testaments of process: practices, samples as finished or unfinished art works and invited speakers reflections. This is the starting point of small scale one day Gatherings/Colloquiums about an artist or a group works instead of an Opening Party. This new paradigm has emerged, as independent small, vital initiatives are always replaced Globally by commercial development, gentrification and rent increases. So one-day event in someone’s home replaces gallery exhibition. Artist work may stay on the wall of that place for a while and interested people or immediate community members can come by appointment.
Between 2012 and 2020 Artship have collaborated and initiated with Istanbul based independent art initiative halka art project numerous exhibitions in Istanbul and brought them to San Francisco, Romania and recently to Portugal. Losing its lease at the break of the Covid-19 pandemic halka would no longer have the building where exhibitions and Artist-in-Residence Program took place for last 10 years. halka's building was the incubation space for their collective work and also where Slobodan lived and worked when he was in Istanbul. The founder of halka, Ipek Çankaya decided to redefine her approach to presenting art in Bodrum, a city on the Aegean Coast. After moving to Bodrum the idea was that halka would occasionally continue its presence in Istanbul through Celebrating Incubation Process Initiative with Artship in the new Resonance space in Istanbul, and potentially through some site specific projects in selected venues.
Between 2020 and 2022 halka art project and Artship Resonance created numerous exhibitions, storytelling performances, lectures and gatherings both in Resonance space in Istanbul and simultaneously on online platforms.
After Slobodan's passing, the members of the ensemble decided to share the tradition in diverse locations in person gatherings as well as on electronic communication platforms, and continue to get together as halka art Resonance.
Apart from working in diverse forms of expression in art, Resonance Initiative is designed to make publications. For that purpose, Resonance Istanbul is created for books to be developed in Istanbul and Resonance Berkeley is created for books in the US.
Resonance Istanbul Publications
Yemek ve Tıp - Dört Makale (Food and Medicine - Four Papers)
Resonance Istanbul, October 2021
Book design by Dennis Letbetter
ISBN: 978-1-7352940-0-1
Introduction
This volume of papers were written by Artship Scholars Research group that feeds the contemporary cultural/educational practice that offers context for inquiry-based expression and presented at the conference Food and Medicine held in 2020 at Victor Babesh University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timosoara, Romania. The papers that derived from anthropology, folk culture and food and medicine studies are Food of the Gods, Ayurvedic Medicine and Contemporary Foods, Collecting Edible Plants in the Wild and Hittite Cookery.
The volume signals commitment to diversity of approaches and interest in contemporary relevance of ancient, indegenious, folkloric and historic knowledge and expressions.
One year later, in March 2022, the book is also published in English as part of Resonance Berkeley collection. ISBN: 978-1-7352940-4-9
Resonance Berkeley Publications
1. FANO - The Educational Village
Special thanks to Kalliopeia Foundation, Tides Foundation for making this publication possible.
Authors - Marija Dragišić Danka Belošević
English translation - Aleksandra Subić
Editing and proofreading the text in English language - Terriann Walling
Cover, layout and technical preparation of the text - Zorana Đorđević
Pictures and a photograph on the cover - Slobodan Dan Paich
Publication year - 2021
ISBN - 978-1-7352940-2-5
Introduction
The story of Fano begins in a London basement but not quite an ordinary basement. It is about the space under the Loughton College of Further Education, which was given to Slobodan to give lectures. The special city of this place was that, in addition to students, members of the local community also visited it freely. Slobodan turned seven years of experience in such inclusive work into architectural drawings, wanting to preserve the idea of an alternative to the educational process. Just at the moment when the college announced the decision to close the space for further use, there was an opportunity to turn Slobodan’s thoughts into a design solution for a, just announced, international architectural competition titled Ideas for a Building for Life Long Learning (Ideas for permanent education facilities). With the project Educational Village or Treatise on Harmony, Slobodan’s idea won first place. His idea of a community in which the village and the school became one, and whose poetics and archetypal features he presented through, as he states, non- modern architectural design and all-time freehand drawing, shortly after winning recognition, was given the opportunity to be realized through summer school near the Italian town of Lecce, on the Fano estate.
Slobodan recalled his friends who participated in the school as lecturers, moderators, students, observers, as well as those who were part of similar projects based on the same idea after its completion, to remember that period. Our interlocutors were Zorica Tasić, Maria Lancaster, Tatjana Stolpović, Racan Paljić, Gary Cook, Lynette Howells-Moore, Roberto Micoccio, Sally Greaves-Lord, and Slobodan Dan Paich. We conducted the talks in the period from April to December 2020, with each of them individually, informally, and according to the principle of free recollection of the interlocutors, of their participation in the summer school. For the breadth of insight into the project, it is valuable that the interlocutors had different positions in it, so the story of Fano can be seen from the origin of the idea, through the organization of the school to a critical review of its implementation and the subsequent impact on other projects. The fact that we were talking about something from a great distance did not prevent our interlocutors from vividly depicting the environment in which the school took place. It is so easy to imagine sleeping in dry stone houses on a pallet and fighting mosquitoes and tarantulas, eating gs in all shapes, bathing in a stream, and changing the world in long conversations under candles.
For five years, the school brought together artists and all those who had a sincere desire to participate in it, regardless of talent, age, nationality... Participants had the opportunity to be engaged in workshops on papermaking, natural colors, techniques of fresco painting, graphics, construction in drywall technique, stone processing for sculpture, and landscape shaping. But, in addition to all the knowledge and skills they could acquire through school, the emphasis was on their commonalities, as Slobodan calls it prehistoric life and the experience they will take from it. That is why the motto of the school was Seeds were planted in Fano, but the harvest is at home (after returning to the city). In the end, we will be free to conclude that this booklet is a kind of evaluation of the Fano Educational Village project, which, although it arrives after four decades, is actually coming at the right time, because only now we can see the yield of sowing from Fano.
Zorana Đorđević ---- Marija Dragišić