Pera Museum in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district continues to offer its visitors a multifaceted program with projects focusing on different areas of art.
The speech and performance series "Electronic Crossovers," implemented in cooperation with the Istanbul-based music collective ÆVOM, brings into question various issues that electronic music feeds on and interacts with such as technology, literature, cinema, environment, psychology, sociology, computer games, politics, urban renewal, nature and philosophy. The fourth meeting of this series, which is the first meeting of 2020, will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 24. At this meeting, musicologist Burcu Yaşin invites participants to think about urban transformation in a sound axis based on her study "I could hear you, now you cannot be heard: On an urban renewal project in Istanbul."
Yaşin's work focuses on how the urban transformation project, implemented in the Sarıgöl neighborhood of the Gaziosmanpaşa district of Istanbul, has affected the soundscape of the neighborhood. In her speech, the musicologist will share with participants how Roma people and musicians who have lived in the same neighborhood for almost 50 years have played an important role in Istanbul's entertainment industry, especially in the 1990s, though remain unmentioned in the city's memory and everyday practice.
Burcu Yaşin's work examining the auditory dimension of urban renewal takes advantage of concepts such as "auditory communities" and "auditory communication" used by Barry Truax, giving a sound-centric reading of the impact of the renewal project on the neighborhood. In the qualitative research, data on the area was generated through the evaluation of interviews with the residents of the neighborhood as well as the residents of the outskirts of the neighborhood who also hear the sounds, observer experiences and photo-video archives. Following the speech, Deniz Erden will perform at 8 p.m., inviting the audience to imagine the sounds of a neighborhood in the process of urban transformation.
