• We were brought together by the burning need for an organisation open to anyone who wants to create “tangible thoughts” that can change the space, time, working conditions, human relations and lifestyles that are shaped by the nightmare of capitalism.
• We were brought together by the desire to establish a collective, public art laboratory that will create the tools of free expression.
• We were brought together by the will to show that we are not prisoners to the art market that turns art into useless entertainment and the artist into a court jester.
• We were driven to action by the belief that there is no reason to wait any longer and that the first step is to change ourselves.
Our aims are:
• To produce actions, works of art and processes that may change the habits shaped by capitalism, instrumentalised social relations, and the mutilated human-nature relationships in our daily lives...
o To make use of arts’ strategies that create social relations, experiences, feelings, moments and spaces with temporary or permanent practices...
o To create public spaces with performances that evaluate, criticise, oppose, and rebel; shapes that bring us to our senses; signs that reveal hypocrisy; with ironic images; rebellious inventions; seducing sounds; mysterious words; and nameless shadows...
• To reshape life with “art” by redefining the relationships of art with politics and society rather than making art a tool of politics...
o To reconsider art within this context...
o To try to understand not what art is but what art does, what art can do...
• To create a structure that can produce direct actions and long term events:
o that can work with local and international organisations, labour unions and platforms in line with its principles;
o that can produce actions which question the relationships of art with society and life.
• To think about the problems of art together with other problems of communal life...
o To determine the problems of art and culture...
o To draw attention to and offer or produce solutions to these problems where necessary...
We, who were brought together by these aims, and who side with work, freedom, organised protest, life, nature and humankind:
• believe that creativity is of vital importance in the creation of a humane lifestyle;
• think that there is no way to offer a new way of life without the creation of a new language and form of expression;
• think that art is the way to overcome the lie “in hearts, books and the streets”; *
• believe that art has the potential to create a new world in emotions, thoughts, dreams and reality, and it is for this very reason that art is political;
• define the “tangible thoughts” that we will create as a political action as much as an artistic one.
Our dreams are of the future. And our journey will continue until it reaches the fulfilled, without condition, people of the future.
* a line from the Nazım Hikmet poem Beş Satırla
Public Art Laboratory