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Starring the Turkish carpet A powerful artifact that defines a culture

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Sara Beesems Roxana Cociorba Erik Jansen Madeleen Dijkman Yoni Lefevre

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9 Introduction 11 Executive summery 13 Purpose 15 Approach 17 Method 19 Conclusions 25 Recommendations 27

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Contents

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Research reportStarring the Turkish carpet

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Introduction A power full artifact that defines a culture

A quest for tracking down the Turkish carpet in Istanbul has come a long way: from the floor of the hotel to the school, the museum, the workshop, the mosque, the repairmen shop, the sellers, and into a marathon of visits payed to Turkish families across a five-story block of flats. We wanted to grasp the story of the carpet and the stories of the people around it.

Did you know that citizens of Istanbul match their furniture to the colors of their carpets? Did you know that a family has different carpets for the summer and winter? Did you know that color is very important to the designers and sellers of the carpet? Or that they sometimes discolor old carpets and dye them again to give them a fresh look? The opinions are strong, refreshing, surprising! The voices of these people are telling the story of a value that is there to stay, in one shape or another.

“A man without a woman, a marriage without children is like a house without a Turkish carpet”. Ufuk – seller of Turkish carpets

Introduction

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Summ

ery

Executive summery An overview of our findings

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Purpose

Purpose The purpose of our research

Our research is a qualitative research. That’s also why we choose to work with in- depth interviews as our main information source. The starting point was our personal material fascination, which all of us wrote about the material textile. That’s how this group was formed. Our research is one standpoint on the theme ‘old craftsmanship in a new context.’

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Approach

Approach Overall evaluation goals

“How does a carpet become a Turkish carpet in Istanbul?”

This was the question that lead to an investigation into the making of culture, regarding one of the most important Turkish symbols: the Turkish carpet.

The goal was to find out how the carpet is invested with value, from its birth as a design, into the stage of being a symbol, towards it’s end- use. An artifact gains meaning when put in relation to a value system and a production system. These together shape the ‘cultural production cycle’ of the Turkish carpet.

The production system is the sum of processes that the carpet, as a product, goes through: design (creation), making, selling, using, collecting, exposing.

The value system is linked to the appreciation that the Turkish carpet gets from the citizens of Istanbul that we interviewed, each of them being

representative to a process of the production system:the design student, the teacher, the designer, the craftsman, the seller, the consumer, the collector.

The concept of ‘culture cycle’ seeks to highlight how a given cultural product is embedded with economic and social processes and how this cultural product (in our case the Turkish carpet) is invested with the present- day values of the Turkish culture. This will refer to: the activities of producers and consumers, the social and economical practices related to the Turkish carpet in formal and informal settings, the appreciation and approach from each perspective in the production system.

The term ‘cultural cycle’ is helpful since it suggests the interconnections across multiple stages of production, including the feedback processes by which new practices lead to new cultural forms for the Turkish carpet.

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Method Our research method

1. The Types of information that were collected

The research consisted of several phases: First collection of data in Holland, research on location in Istanbul and further research in Holland, after return.

In the first instance, the material collected was: research proposal, theoretical material such as articles, reviews, internet content, books and magazines, contacts, interviews of Turkish families in Holland.

The second and most important step was done on location, in Istanbul. Types of information: observation, interviews, photo, video material. Further on, we collected more audio material from translations.

2. The Method that we created and how the relevant information was gathered

We chose to work from the perspective of the “cultural production cycle” of the Turkish carpet. This approach required a first analysis of how production works. We made a scheme for the cycle of production, from creation to consumer.

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SerefUfuk

Musa

Memhet

Familie

Peter

Familie

Familie

Students

Familie

Repairsman

Elif (student) Derya teciner Teacher

craftsmanTURkiSh CaRPET

designer

seller

consumer

Schedule of the cultural production of a Turkish carpet

3. Schedule

According to this first scheme we chose the relevant persons to interview- all citizens of Istanbul. Sometimes, one person lead us to another, and the relevance of the people we found in this way increased, since our contacts were not mediated by Internet and phone calls anymore, but by the real people. We went to see a carpet seller, Ufuk, and he lead us to another seller, Seref; Seref recommended a repairman’s shop. There, we found a collector, Peter. And Peter lead us to a designer-artist, Musa. We went to talk to each of them, in the environment in which, we considered, the Turkish carpet is invested with value:

- Nisa Doker, Serin Orman, Elif Puren Ozdemir(design students) and (teacher) – inside the Mimar Sinan school, Department of Traditional Turkish Arts -Carpet and kilim design - Mehmet Girgic (master feltmaker, craftsman and artist) and Theresa May-O’Brien (designer, artist) - inside their workshop, which was also their home in Istanbul - Musa Basaran (designer, artist) – inside his atelier in Istanbul - Ufuk(carpet seller) and Serif Ozen (carpet seller) -inside each of their own carpet shops - Ramzel(a repairman) -inside a repairman’s workshop

- Peter William Hansen(collector) – inside the repairman’s shop, he was there to collect a carpet

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4. How our information was analysed

Our scheme is an abstract analytical aid for thinking about cultural production. We created it as a graphic, to localize the steps in which a carpet is made and, most of all, to visualize the relevant people that contribute to its creation as a cultural product.

A wide range of opinions are confronted and they offer different perspectives on the same cultural heritage These points of view come together to form topics of conversation: on color, symbol, way of use, value in Turkish society, etc. Further on, we listened to their stories and what they could tell us about the Turkish carpet. We found differences and similarities, but most of all, we thought of how we could make transparent, to a distant reader or viewer, what their worlds and approaches are, on the culture of the carpet. After the interviews, we found out what were the main topics that arose, thus the main aspects in the production of culture that are still valid for the people in Istanbul,

VALUE IN TURKISH SOCIETY, COLOR, SYMBOLS, HANDMADE/ MACHINE-MADE, USAGE and FUTURE.

today. We chose to put all the relevant opinions under one topic, since more point of views on one cultural aspect will give insight into the richness of perception and opinions, but will also guide us towards points to which they agree, and those will tell more about generalities and the taste of the Turkish, as well. These main topics represent the focus points in the cultural production of the Turkish carpet:

They are also the filter through which we shall be exposing the results of the research.

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Conclusions

Conclusions Conclusions and interpretations

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Recomm

endations

Recommedations

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