Concours entre la Séculaire et le Sacré dans le Patrimoine Culturel en Turquie
(2025)
author(s): Tolga Theo Yalur
published in: Research Catalogue
Cet article s’appuie sur une approche psychanalytique et culturelle des idéologies et de l’économie-politique dans les constructions de vérité et les récits autour des lieux et des événements concernant les identités ethniques, religieuses et nationales, et propose une opinion interdisciplinaire sur les récits de vérité des psycho-réalités culturelles formées autour des parcs, des lieux monumentaux et des génocides en Turquie. Cette opinion porte sur le complexe, le concours du profane et du sacré, pour lequel l’article présente une interprétation détaillée du matériel/mondain et du religieux/au-delà. Les symptômes dans les lieux monumentaux en Turquie, parc culturel à Izmir et Parc Gezi et Sainte-Sophie à Istanbul, révèlent les mythes inhabituels encodés dans ces lieux, génocides, complexes et leurs liens avec les textes culturels d’aujourd’hui. Le réseau de la réalité informe les symptômes conscients et inconscients autour des parcs, des musées, des places ou des lieux monumentaux en Turquie et au-delà.
In Dialogue with Society: Democratic Engagement through Theatre
(2025)
author(s): Jörgen Dahlqvist
published in: Research Catalogue
This research project explores how theatre can contribute to democratic engagement. The starting point was artistic probes investigating aspects of democracy: participation, deliberation and inclusion. The probes resulted in three productions presented at theatre institutions in Sweden. In Skapa Demokrati (Creating Democracy), participation was promoted by encouraging the audience members to create a democracy together. The performance thus allowed participants to experience a democratic process by actively engaging in the making of a constitution. In Öva Demokrati (Practicing Democracy), deliberation was in focus. The performance allowed the audience to deliberate on suggestions for strengthening Swedish democracy. Through methods inspired by political science, the audience was invited to speak and listen to arguments for the different proposals. In the performance, they were also presented with a variety of ways of voting to illustrate how different electoral systems can encourage engagement and give minorities a chance to be heard. In Monument, different strategies were used to promote inclusion. The project started with the idea that monuments say something about society. The monuments were used as vehicles to include voices from the residents of Helsingborg. The artwork presented these different experiences through a multi-perspective script. Other outreach activities also helped enable inclusion. Narrative analysis for theatre was used to reflect on these probes, allowing for a deeper understanding of how performances were conceptualised and structured, and how they made meaning for the audience. Lastly, the performance Ibsendekonstruktion II: Brand was written and staged to reflect on how the research has changed the artistic practice. The research has resulted in strategies for inclusion and a novel theatre format, the conversational theatre, which encourages participation and deliberation. These outcomes provide the theatre with methods to be in dialogue with society.
Zübük: The Liberal Tyrant’s Authoritarian Spirit
(2025)
author(s): Tolga Theo Yalur
published in: Research Catalogue
During the early weeks of the Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, the Turkish government banned gatherings in Taksim Square. One man, however, stood alone in front of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), one of the symptoms around the never-ending events and culture wars, with the police around, obviously "obeying" the ban on gatherings. He instantly went viral on the internet: The Standing Man (Duran Adam), reminiscent of an unknown 1950s Hollywood melodrama The Man Who Stood There, while others began to stand "alone" nearby, but not exactly in the legally described form of an assembly or public gathering. As such, only the man's name was mythified and not the other participants'.
DATA OCEAN THEATRE (OUT OF THE BLUE); A Discipline-Fluid Postdoctoral Artistic Research Project Exposition
(2025)
author(s): vincent roumagnac
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
Data Ocean Theatre (D.O.T.) is a four-year artistic research project that explores the intersection of myths, Western theatre memory, new media, digital animism, climate emergency, sea and ocean transformations, queer subcultures, and technological mutations in relation to aspects of “submersion” as a contemporary living condition.
Expanding on the claimed unsustainability of Western theatre’s anthropocentric foundations, D.O.T. examines how the notion and practice of the stage transform amidst climate urgency, technological hypergrowth, and discipline-fluid hybridization. It seeks to generate experiments on a new temporal ecology of the stage, examining how theatre-making infrastructures might transition within a multi-agential dynamic of emergence.
D.O.T. appears, disappears, and reappears through a series of polymorphic artworks and research affordances based on the ecodramaturgical consideration of the simultaneous phenomenon of 1. the rising sea and ocean levels, 2. the exponential growth of big data in our informational age, and 3. the emotional overload caused by the latter two happening, projection, and prophecy.
D.O.T. explores inherited sea-and-ocean-oriented myths and revisits theatre plays with a marine backdrop, looking simultaneously into contemporary nautical vocabulary and sea imagery used as metaphors for computational realities.
D.O.T. proposes to re-mythologise Western theatre foundations by forming an alternative pantheon for a queer, hydrofeminist, and technoanimist reset of the “tragic,” at the interplay between a syncretic marine mythology and the ambiguities of “technology-as-monster” narratives.
In D.O.T. project, the forces and fragilities of transforming marine ecosystems intersect with algorithmic-conditioned life and crossbreeding of diverse art disciplines and research fields based on collaborations, generating imaginary prototypes for future societal constructions in the floods.
D.O.T. is structured around several key components: the prologue Simultaneous Environments, featuring a series of experimental works; the central project Tragedy and the Goddexxes, which culminates in three public exhibitions; and a series of workshops, residencies, and a final publication in the form of an exposition on the Research Catalogue.
This final publication of the DATA OCEAN THEATRE postdoctoral artistic research project (2021–2024) titled 'DATA OCEAN THEATRE (OUT OF THE BLUE); A Discipline-Fluid Postdoctoral Artistic Research Project Exposition' performs on the Research Catalogue as both an aesthetico-epistemic object in its own right and as an a posteriori account, or catalogue raisonné, of the project. It also acts as a supplement to the author's doctoral publication, Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses), completing the latter to form a diptych on the Research Catalogue. Similar to the doctoral publication, the non-linear, non-hierarchical, and non-chronological reading, or hyper-reading, of Data Ocean Theatre (Out of the Blue) invites its visitors to navigate freely and compose their own fluid, archipelagic, and tidal experience to make sense of the project as a whole.
A Note on Early Quantum Mechanics
(2025)
author(s): Tolga Theo Yalur
published in: Research Catalogue
Intellectual landscape in mathematics, quantum mechanics and physics, philosophy of science, and other fields. Henri Poincaré's mathematical insights and Albert Einstein's seminal thought experiments opened the door to understanding the most fundamental aspects of physical reality, from the subatomic realm of particles and fields to the largest galactic superclusters and the origin of the universe itself. The pioneering work of Poincaré and Einstein in the early 20th century fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe, calling into question long-held ideas about space, time, and the very core of reality. Epicurus’ groundbreaking reflection in these fields influence the fields of applied mathematics today, profoundly shaping the scientific understanding of the solid forms that make up the universe.
Epicurus’ Quantum Philosophy
(2025)
author(s): Tolga Theo Yalur
published in: Research Catalogue
Quantum methods, based on differential equations, proved invaluable for many applications, ranging from building complex machines to mapping the motions of celestial objects. They represent a decisive advance in humanity's ability to understand and quantify the multi-dimensional reality. Epicurus’ groundbreaking reflection in these fields influence the fields of applied mathematics today, profoundly shaping the scientific understanding of the solid forms that make up the universe.
