Özge Çelikaslan engages in several archive initiatives in Turkey and Europe. In her talk, she will discuss her collective practices regarding activist archiving, digital technologies and accessibility, archival care and affect, obsolete media, and political nostalgia. Çelikaslan is a PhD candidate at the Braunschweig University of Art. She was a member of several film and video collectives. Her works were shown in biennials and festivals, recently at the 17th Istanbul Biennial. She is co-founder of the digital media archive of social movements bak.ma.
bak.ma (means "don’t look" in Turkish)* digital media archive of social movements appeared following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as Gezi Park Resistance. By collectivizing knowledge and memory and operating as a space of empowerment bak.ma radicalizes the politics of the archive and indicates possibilities for creating a living memory of the social movements. bak.ma consists of voluminous video collections beginning from the 1960s until today covering political incidents and movements in Turkey’s history. As a constantly growing archive with a participatory approach, the users generate the content by bringing the video activist footage in, which leads to turning it into a collaborative archive. Starting from 2018 users from other countries started uploading their video recordings, texts, photographs, and sound recordings. * “.ma” is an URL extension signifying ‘media archive’, which is originally the nation URL extension in Morocco.
Speakers: Özge Çelikaslan