About Meeting Point

August 6-12, 2007 Gülpınar, Turkey

The Meeting Point project is an international gathering around art and creativity, taking place in a rural setting with participants from different cultural backgrounds. It is a mobile project aiming to take place in a different villages In Turkey each year. The project in Gülpınar consisted of a series of events around the central backbone of three hands-on workshops on photography, video and local cuisine. Meeting Point in Gülpınar intended to create at least a weeklong community where cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary experiences were shared. The village was a playground for creativity during the day and was be converted into a festival venue at night with theatre, music and screenings.

Photography Workshop

The workshop concentrated on building narratives, making use of the rural environment, the history, geography and the local community. The participants were encouraged to form their own style, attitude and interest; accumulating a personal stock of images and forming a track record. The final work was a collage mirroring the photographer, as much as the surrounding in which the photographs were taken. There was an exhibition at the end of the workshop and a booklet containing a selection of photographs will be published.

Video Workshop: entropyTV

entropyTV stands for a 'television network to reduce the hegemony of broadcast channels and film industries’. It is intended to become a video-blog publishing short videos and acting as an online archive committed to the preservation of the diversity of identities.

The workshop in Gülpınar focused on creating short video narratives, shot in a single take. The whole process is also an act focusing on the economics of video narration. Because shooting single takes requires knowledge, creative vision and organizational precision. The videos, shot from the moment of turning the camera on, to the moment of turning the camera off, with no interruption and no editing, are published online on the video-blog of entropyTV.

Local Cuisine Workshop: Women of Gülpınar

The workshop investigated local ingredients and the local cuisine. In the first five days, participants prepared local recipes under the guidance of the women of Gülpınar. The workshop considered the differences between rural and urban cuisine, re-evaluated eating habits and the processes involved in food preparation in relation to culture and geography. The creative part of the workshop was designing a full meal for the last day of the project, converging cooking methods and customs learned in the village with participants’ own. All recipes prepared in the workshop will be published.