1. Introduction

Welcome to the opening seminar of the OPUS XI initiative's project: Designing a Nation of Nomads. In this seminar, Concepts on the Move, I aim to introduce our initiative, our project, and its conceptual background.

My name is Osman Şişman. I studied philosophy and design. I worked at the university until 2016 and was kicked out since I signed the Academics for Peace petition. I am the founder of Yort Kitap, around which the OPUS XI initiative is gathered. We published 18 books in Yort between 2019-2022. Yort was an independent publishing house focused on contemporary thought, cinema theory, design and literature. Most of our books are open-access. You can find them at www.yortkitap.com.

OPUS XI is an independent initiative founded by people working in the fields of art, design and humanities in Eskişehir. We organize seminars, workshops, exhibitions, concerts, and publish books whenever possible. You can access detailed information about the events we have held so far at www.opusonbir.com

Designing a Nation of Nomads is a series of seminars and workshops supported by the EU project CultureCIVIC: Support for Culture and Arts. The outcomes of those activities in Eskişehir between September 2022 and March 2023 will be exhibited in an exhibition.

The project is based on the concept of nomad. Nomads, for us, include not only those who had to or chose to leave their place of residence for various reasons, but also those who have experiences that go beyond the definition of citizenship by states. From this perspective, refugees, those who are excluded from the social sphere due to their sexual orientation and gender identity, those who cannot benefit from citizenship and urban rights due to their political preferences, and objectors (even if they do not have to leave their place of residence) are also nomads.

The seminars will be held open to the public, focus on the history of immigration, its various forms, and the sources of its negative effects on the lives of individuals and communities. The workshops aim to imagine a nomadic nation that turns exclusion mechanism upside down through a creative processes. We hope that the outcomes of a collective and intense process will be mind-opening representations of “nomadic thinking” and make it possible to imagine another society together.

The project was developed by Eşref Taner İlerde, who studied architecture and is currently working for Tepebaşı Municipality, Hande Çevik, a sociology graduate working in an NGO dealing with the problems of refugee LGBTi community, Adem Dağlar, who is a conscientious objector, and me.

We were inspired by the idea of Designing a Nation, which we dreamed of with Harun Kaygan and Aren Emre Kurtgözü, but could never realize years ago. Another inspiration was Rauf Kösemen's works on nation design. We transformed and developed that idea considerably. Our intention is to speculate on culture and design of an imaginary nomadic nation, and to expose the evil aspects of present exclusionary mechanisms in nation-states.

2. Imaginary Residents, Fantastic Nomads

The term A Nation of Nomads may seem to be an oxymoron at first glance. Nation-states’ myths on their establishment mostly contain narratives about acquiring a place, settling there and owning it, after a long or short nomadic period. A nation is always a community that migrated long ago, but has settled ever since, as if it will never move again.

Our experience today does not seem to support the claim of settlement, however. Our bodies, minds, knowledge we possess, our labor, all kinds of savings that we can roughly call capital, even our genes are constantly on the move. The objects we use are designed at one end of the world, produced at another, and after long journeys they end up on the market where we buy them. We work online with our customers in another city or country. Sometimes we migrate to other parts of the country or the world for reasons such as vacation, education, asylum, etc. We never stop in the city, we constantly move. I think that settlement is not an experience but a dream, and we have to be exposed to very strong persuasive tools to believe that we are settled, despite the real conditions of our experience. In our project, especially in the workshops, we will attempt to grasp how these persuasive tools work.

The humankind is the subject of a civilization constructed from an enormous set of discourses that make predictions about the forms, desires, abilities and weaknesses of their living bodies, and impose rules. This set of discourses, which embodies in concepts, institutions and objects, dominates the body, and the outcome is the human subject. It is not possible to become a subject without these operations, some of which are obvious, while others are ambiguous. Following Foucault and Agamben, we can call these self- practices, these administrative tools as the apparatuses. They are micro- and macro-political interventions, some of which are very openly violent, some of which are invisible because they are adopted and internalized by the subjects.

Some of the apparatuses are quite concrete: For example, all architectural structures such as modern hospitals, schools, prisons were built on the basis of a principle that observes the imperfect, deficient, sinful, criminal bodies from a single point of view, and aims at their rehabilitation by this surveillance. Architectural plans, experienced as the organization of walls and corridors, are embodied ideas that impose their immutable assumptions about bodies and minds. Objects of consumption we use every day are designed according to assumptions on the measurements of the bodies of the people who will use them, their bodily and mental potentials, the operations they will follow to fulfill a function, and of course they impose those assumptions on the users. They claim to be designed for bodies and minds, but they actually construct those very experiences of bodies and minds. Therefore, they are also concrete apparatuses.

And here are some abstract apparatuses: Concepts such as shame, regret, and sin that religions and ethical doctrines endlessly reproduce, the guidelines for being a proper citizen suggested by the national education curricula, and current new age doctrines that recommend bodily and mental awareness are also abstract apparatuses.

The public posters designed by İhap Hulusi, which brought together the images of modern-looking people and the public rules on how to be a good citizen in the first years of the Turkish Republic were also apparatuses. The well-known mainstream newspaper with the phrase "Turkey belongs to the Turks" under its logo is an apparatus, as well.

In short, the entire set of abstract and concrete discourses that establish our subjectivity are apparatuses that contain collective fantasies, serve social discipline, far from the truth of our body and nature, and only by their operation we become human subjects. Walter Benjamin's famous phrase on apparatuses and violence is very important: "There is no document of civilization that is not also a certificate of barbarism." The only way to establish such a complex culture on the human body is to discipline it with the violent interventions of administrative tools.

Not only the definitions of the proper citizen, but also the opinions and beliefs about those who fall outside this definition and all others are the product of collective fantasies rather than collective experience. We should also consider how powerful the broadcasting socio-technology is: Newspapers’ role in mental construction of nations, radios in the spread of nationalist ideas and sentiments in the previous great wars, television and the Internet as the strongest channels of disinformation today are very effective apparatuses. The photographic medium also provides fertile materials to the nationalist imagination by relying on the representative power of the image.

For example, Steve McCurry's photograph taken decades ago and published in an issue of the National Geographic magazine of the period is the first image that comes to mind when we talk about "Afghan women". The image of Romani people created by artists such as Josef Koudelka, Jacques Leonard, and Tony Gatlif in photography and cinema are also highly representative examples for all of us, and they nourish a fantasy that is far from real experience. The collective notions of the social relations of the Romani people within their own community and with the rest of society (negative codes such as their dealings with illegal jobs, their daily lives, their reckless attitudes in privacy, as well as positive attributions such as their musical talents and cheerful lives) dominate both in the written, visual and audio materials of various publications. Similarly, discourses about the bodies of black people (the myth of high performance in sports and sex) constitute the image of the other.

The same goes for the figure of "nomad", which we will focus on. In today's world, where discriminatory and humiliating discourses about refugees and immigrants forced to migrate to Turkey from war zones in the Middle East have become a terrible fantasy shared by all segments of the society, images and opinions about the other are not based on the experiences of individuals, but on the basis of oppressive political aims circulated by the effective use of ideological tools. These are of critical importance both for our daily life and for our project.

3. Types of Nomads

Refugees, undocumented or undocumented migrants are examples of the "nomad" figure. But as I said at the beginning, both due to today's economic-political conditions and the narrowing definitions of proper citizens by states, especially in countries like ours, due to fascist tendencies, almost everyone becomes a nomad candidate. Even states mobilize their proper citizens as forced nomads inside and outside the country. Policemen, teachers and doctors who perform compulsory service the eastern part of the country are also nomads; missionaries sent to colonial countries and contributed to the realization of religious- political programs are nomads as well. Soldiers sent to fight to the other end of the world are also nomads, and so are the laborers who have to commute miles from where they live every day. Tourists are also nomads, as are recent skilled laborers who decide to work and live in better conditions in other countries. Barbarians and bandits, presented in history as the opposite of the settled, are also nomads, as are dispossessed dervishes who oppose the orthodox circle of religions and advocate original heterodox interpretations.

The coded spaces between borders, which the state calls “homeland", are paved with lines of surveillance, control, discipline and labor exploitation. These are places where residents live, and nomads enter and exit. In Night Shyamalan's film The Village, there is an example of an imaginary community which radically separates what is inside and outside its borders. In the film, we learn at the end that a wealthy group who lost their relatives in crime while living in cities with high crime rates, established a village on a secure land, in a forest, and lived in a conservative order. To prevent the young generation from leaving the community, they invented “others” in shape of monsters. In order to find a cure for an unexpected disease in the village, the blind daughter of one of the village's wise elders is sent to the modern world to get medicine. The fact that she will not be able to see the life outside the border is what makes her a suitable messenger. To be a proper citizen of the nation, one should avoid seeing the other in flesh and blood, having a relationship with them. Ons should just believe in the imagination and discourse built about them.

The coded spaces between borders, which the state calls “homeland", are paved with lines of surveillance, control, discipline and labor exploitation. These are places where residents live, and nomads enter and exit. In Night Shyamalan's film The Village, there is an example of an imaginary community which radically separates what is inside and outside its borders. In the film, we learn at the end that a wealthy group who lost their relatives in crime while living in cities with high crime rates, established a village on a secure land, in a forest, and lived in a conservative order. To prevent the young generation from leaving the community, they invented “others” in shape of monsters. In order to find a cure for an unexpected disease in the village, the blind daughter of one of the village's wise elders is sent to the modern world to get medicine. The fact that she will not be able to see the life outside the border is what makes her a suitable messenger. To be a proper citizen of the nation, one should avoid seeing the other in flesh and blood, having a relationship with them. Ons should just believe in the imagination and discourse built about them.

Similar to geographical and imaginary codes, a temporal and historical code can also be identified. For example, in the Norwegian TV-series Beforeigners, thousands of time-igrants from various eras of the country strangely appear in Oslo Bay, and establish their own communities in modern Norwegian society. Integration and assimilation policies developed by institutions, democratic and politically correct attitudes for time-igrants comes to such a level that a policewoman from the Viking era is appointed to an important position in the police force. The adaptation process and the cultural differences between time-igrants and locals are presented in a critical parody of the progressive perspective. This scenario is also a successful representation of prejudices such as primitiveness, lack of civilization, filth, immorality, and inclination to crime regarding the way of life of refugees from other countries. Societies that think of themselves as "modern" find immigrants underdeveloped with a morbid temporal coding.

4. Migration of Things

There are two reasons why I give examples from architecture, design and cinema. Firstly, we will focus on design and art in our project. The second and perhaps more important reason is that the creative productions in these media have the potential to reveal the mechanism of apparatuses used by the state and institutions as a tool of domination. Our aim is to oppose established and institutional concepts and aesthetic tools with art and design, which resist coding, are in motion, and are sensitive to flows. We want to use irony, parody and nomadic thinking tools to build our own nomadic fantasies in a fiction free from exclusion and oppression, relying on our bodily and individual experiences.

Let's continue with some examples in contemporary art: Eda Gecikmez exhibited a series in the window of the German Cultural Center in Ankara in the past months. In the series titled “The Bird Is Not Seen, But Its Voice Is In The Tree”, Gecikmez's grasp of the forced migration in the Middle East was quite mind-opening, as she moved away from an anthropocentric perspective and focused on one of the other beings, the Arabian nightingale, which massively migrated north, due to the war in Syria.

The famous contemporary artist Ai Wei Wei also preferred to address the issue of migration through objects in a few of his works. He made us think about the "migration of things" with the life jackets he piled up in the art scene in Europe.

The work of Kaliopi Lemos, who adorned a small sailing boat with the tags of illegal immigrants who lost their lives while trying to cross the Aegean Sea. It was exhibited in the Çanakkale Biennial in 2012. This work inspired me and a very dear friend of mine, with whom I visited that exhibition at that time, for an ironic contemporary art work: The weakness of the social reactions to this disaster prompted us to design a performance. It was to be a performance in the municipal swimming pool of a coastal city, where well-known intellectuals, academics and contemporary artists teach illegal immigrants how to swim. We had hoped to show how obsolete writings, opinions, criticisms, works of art were in the face of an international and mass murder. Of course, this project did not materialize.

5. Our Nomads

As I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, we wish to put aside the exclusionary and violent discourse that has pervaded the current political scene, and to design an imaginary nation of nomads based on our own experiences. The adjectives attributed to nomadism reveal the morbid structure of the institutions, and decipher the prejudices. We imagine an exercise in thinking, which has the potential to transform the way we know, see, act, and judge.

Of course, like any exercise in thinking, ours has epistemological, aesthetic, political and ethical aspects. My seminar and workshop focuses on epistemology. With the set of concepts that I will mention at the end of this seminar and try to deepen in the workshops, I would like to test how an imaginary nation of nomads can reach a persuasive language, culture, law, traveling, in flux, away from absolute judgments. Eşref Taner will focus on city and architecture as exclusionary and disciplinary instruments by the state and its institutions. Hande will discuss how immigration politics ignores people in terms of both racial and sexual identity. Adem will bring up the issue of conscience and explore how to imagine an ethics on the move.

With the limited possibilities and potentials, we will try to free the immigrant issue from the burdens of oppressive politics and discuss it through the metaphor of nomadism. Improving the living conditions of immigrants or making decisions about their routes is not and should not be our duty. From an abstract and imaginary position, i.e. the field of art and design; we will attempt to grasp as many real aspects of the nomadic experience as possible in our workshops.

6. Concepts on the Move

Of course, we have some sources of inspiration. Perhaps our most important inspiration is the idea of nomadic thinking, which focuses on the dynamics of things that are always in flux and the analysis of the forces that drive them into that flow, as opposed to institutional thinking, description and representation of the permanent. It is possible to analyze the processes that gather bodies, objects, labor and mental energy together and distribute them in different directions from a kino-political perspective. We aim for an experience in which the flows are grasped instead of a scene where ideas and concepts are fixed and almost stiffly posed. As such, we hope to be included in an area where aesthetic judgments are also developed based on attitudes, not images. We imagine a scene where the masses are navigating the world together at a walking speed, instead of violent actions by the state and institutions by stopping what is in the flow, coding what cannot be codified, disciplining, collecting and exploiting what is being scattered. Instead of permanent properties, we will try to find travel supplies and basic items that we can carry with us in a tiny bag. It can also be mind-opening to review metaphors instead of literal meanings, and transsexuals instead of straight sexualities. We mentioned that the current reality as presented to us is the fantasies of the dominant politics; we want to build inclusive and affirmative nomadic fantasies, at our own scale, from our own experience. Instead of reproducing the strategies of the dominant politics, we want to investigate the vital tactics.

That's all I have to say for today. I hope to deal with these concepts in future seminars and workshops. Thank you for your patience.

OSMAN ŞİŞMAN

He was born in 1979 in Izmir. He studied design and philosophy. He taught at universities until he was expelled in 2017 for signing the Academics for Peace petition. He took part in the production team of documentaries about the environmental struggle, human rights violations and professional organizations. Between 2019-2022, he worked for Yort Kitap. He is a member of Opus XI initiative.