Yellow Brick is launching an interdisciplinary research project in Cappadocia and New Ionia in collaboration with Cappadocia University (Mustafapaşa – formerly Sinassos) and OR.artspace (Athens). The project will consist of field research and a series of workshops in both areas and will culminate in an art exhibition in Athens and a bilingual publication (English and Greek). The artistic project “Cappadocia – New Ionia: The unseen practice of midwives” focuses on the issues of midwives’ practices as healers and as “links” between the respective communities in which they operated. It examines the social geography in which they lived before and after the population exchange, their ability to practice midwifery, and their living conditions as women from the East. The artistic project seeks to bring midwives’ practices into dialogue with contemporary thought on collective learning and politics of care. It focuses on examining these practices both historically and in the modern context to highlight their significance in creating communities of care. The artistic project proposes a narrative through memory and oral history, collecting testimonies from second and third generation descendants of individuals affected by the population exchange. By combining field and archival research through the involvement and collaboration of contemporary artists, theorists, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, it aims to reflect on the past and to view the present through cultural heritage (folk stories and traditions, relics, handicrafts, music, and song).
Through a series of research actions and workshops, an art exhibition and a publication, it researches and wishes to highlight the value of traditional knowledge in today’s society, focusing on midwives’ practices of the time. This knowledge was intertwined within the social fabrics of the time and prevailing social structures (the establishment of midwives’ role in a patriarchal society), and simultaneously coexisted with the natural environment (the properties of medicinal plants as well as rituals that seemed metaphysical and connected with myths but also with the healing of the body). Therefore, the artistic project seeks traces and fragments of a healing and social practice that was primarily experiential, passed down orally from generation to generation, and was lost after the medicalization of the midwifery profession.
The working group consists of Elpida Rikou (PhD in Social Psychology, anthropologist, visual artist), Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki (visual artist, researcher, educator), Nuno Cassola (filmmaker and carpenter), Sanem Su Avci (PhD candidate, Department of Political Science and Modern History at Panteion University), and Bülent Özçelik (PhD in philosophy and professor of social and political studies at Cappadocia University). Exhibition curation by Eliana Otta (visual artist, curator – PhD in artistic research from Vienna).
The exhibition will be held at or.artspace, and the workshops at Yellow Brick, or.artspace, and Cappadocia University.
19 – 22 September 2024
Conference ‘Revisiting the Turkish – Greek exchange in its centennial’, Cappadokia
Lecture Performance: ‘Following the roots: a conversation on the present the past exchange’ by Sanem Su Avci and Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki
5 – 7 October 2024
Exhibition at or.artspace
OPENING 5 Octomber 2024
Cappadocia – New Ionia: The unseen practice of midwives.
Lecture performance 6 October 2024with Sanem Su Avci
Workshop 7 October 2024 with Elpida Rikou
9 – 10 November 2024
Prsentation ‘Emotions of the Population Exchange’ by Dr Bülent Özçelik
Initiator – Project Leader Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki
Curated by Eliana Otta
Research Consultant Elpida Rikou
Adviser Bülent Özçelik
Production and Cultural Manager Daphne Burt Koufopanou
Photography Adviser Nuno Cassola
Supported by the Greek Minister of Culture
The research has been kindly supported by Gwaertler Stiftung and the Necessity Fund
is the founder of Yellow Brick – research a project space/residency devoted to artist's research and playground/testing ground for exhibition making.Her personal work entangles materiality through methodologies of exploring, collecting and archiving, resulting in the creation of sculptural manifestations around the ideas of topos. For Sifostratoudaki, materiality stands as a broader term for framing geography, object, humans, language and gestures and sculpture as a moving organism.