I started doing research on influences of culture shaping our identity and migration. I found so many artists which focus on migration and belonging. I started to focusing on stuck between cultures, from this I created a mind map that comes to my mind about anything and everything. From my experiences growing up here I know language is a hige barrier and I had to learn english in school. So for this I thought about the influences it has on me such as feeling embarrased, feeling like an outsider when I didn’t know anything. These thought brought emotions such as feeling lonely and isolated. I also thought about the turkish culture and british culture how polar opposites they are, such as my household was wuite traditional and we have a strong community sense where we live back home. This includes topics like religion, cultural values, in most cases I hated the community back home becayse it was a pressure to always fit in and live in the same ways as everyone else. I feel like most immigrants including my culture too, we always try to stay connected back home using different ways such as Eid, a religious day for muslims where we celebrate with family, we always do it every year knowing we’re not actually back home and it doesn’t feel special like it does when we are back in Turkey. However, everyone always tries to make it a thing because it connects us back to our heritage. There is always the “neighbourhood pressure” this is a term used in turkey a lot where you care about what people around you who are not necessarily related to you think about you, their opinions of you matter and reputation in the society.
I also thought about identity, from this linking it to culture I was thinking about creating a project on my personal challenges going through my experience and documentation. This includes typography merging cultures, I never created a typeface before so I think this would be really good for my portfolio. I thought home difference between home and public, in some ways it creates two personas for many people even from my experiences, some people can behaviour changes which to me was always odd. The two personas includes turkish and british culture, questions such as “where do you like the most” when I was little was something I always asked from people around me. I can develop the two personas and create a project on this which seems like very vague but with research I feel like it could be interesting.
David group tutorial
Today I had a group tutorial with David and we all spoke about our ideas. I chose to speak about stuck between two cultures and I explained my experience with it. David and other people in the group found it really interesting. They suggested I could look into things like AIR BNB branding, they focus on belonging wherever you are in the world. I think belonging is a very interesting topic which relates to my idea. Other examples was suggested such as bend it like Beckham film, I watched this film before and it focuses on immigrants living in UK and gender roles most importantly. Its shows belonging and how immigrants try to say connected using their culture. Someone mentioned the word distance, as one of the members lives away from their extended family and talked about the way how being far away from home it’s weird to celebrate traditional days because it doesn’t feel the same. David suggested I should read some articles and Michal Iwanowski, a photographer in Cardiff which I studied back in Psychogeography. David mentioned this project relates to psychogeography so he said research on that route.
The next step was to research work on these issues and learn more about it. I like doing existing research as it gives me inspiration and see where has people taken their ideas. It’s always exciting and benefits my practice.
Busra Yildiz 