Creative Remembrance: a workshop and exhibition process for reimagining the city

As we walk along Atatürk Boulevard from Ulus, the historical city center of the capital Ankara, the modern city center of Yenişehir welcomes us. This journey from Ulus to Yenişehir offers a similar experience from the sheltered world of the family, encountering society's unknown world. While this "new" image of the city finds expression for generations with different stories, meanings and narratives on the one hand, it also preserves the charm of the "new" with the uncanny of the unfixable.
In this framework, the workshop focused on childhood-youth stories in Yenişehir, grounding from the fact that the memories about everyday life amount to numberless narratives about the city, and vice versa. The narratives that linger in these places may feel as if the city cannot hold any new memories, so we may need to forget to make space for the new ones. Yenişehir, in the urban history of Ankara, had been a district of constant change. It had for many decades numberless projects that were abandoned, changed, or transformed as well as numberless narratives which were resisting against the change itself. In this work, our exploration focused on this transition of this area, Yenişehir, parallel to the most turbulent life of human life, an adolescent transitioning into a young adult which we considered as ideal to explore the theme of incompleteness, transition, transformation and change.
The workshop aimed to unearth the stories that will be gathered through interviews with people who have spent their childhood and youth in Yenişehir or with people who frequented Yenişehir when they were children and young people. With the participants of the workshop, we contacted a group of people, and documented their memories from youth and early adulthood via video and audio recordings. Together with the workshop participants we explored ways in which we could recreate these memories. The result was a series of images and stories that were co-created by the participants as a memory map in such a way that strangers who hadn't met before in real life, could share memories in fiction through the shared experience of place. Thus, through this workshop, what seemed like Yenişehir was “too full” to contain any more memories, became a starting point for creative remembrance by which the stories exhibited and explored ways of selective recollection of memories for the future of the city.