Hi, I’m Elif Çiğdem Artan, and museumbuzzy.com is my personal blog – an open archive where I collect my thoughts reflecting on various aspects of life and my works produced across different platforms.
I believe museums are the main public spaces of social memory by displaying all areas of life and their living communities. Thus, several different façades of life, including social policies, theoretical scholarship, popular culture, and everyday encounters, fit into the range of interests in @museumbuzzy.
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECT:
2022/23 Mercator-IPC Fellow
“Documenting Turkey’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention and Discussing This Decision’s Potential for EU Member States”
LAST WORK EXPERIENCE:
Between May 2019 – September 2022, I worked at DaMigra (Dachverband der Migrantinnen e.V. – Migrant Women’s Umbrella Association) as a researcher. I gained expertise in the comprehensive implementation of the Istanbul Convention in Germany from an intersectional perspective. In addition to developing concepts for a series of events and publications, I conducted workshops and got close relationships with migrant and refugee women. Among others, I am a co-author of the DaMigra-GREVIO-Shadow Report, and the initiator of the multilingual postcard (in 11 languages) on cyber violence.
DOCTORAL RESEARCH:
In my doctoral research project, entitled The Future of the Present: Autonomous Archiving of Activist Videos, I used grounded theory with ethnographic research methodologies and analyzed the born-digital materials that remained from the Occupy movements in New York and Istanbul. Through 53 face-to-face interviews with the actors engaged with two central autonomous archives (Interference Archive in New York and bak.ma in Istanbul), my research sought to answer the following question: How can autonomous media archives contribute to the non-linear and non-authoritarian history-writing of the early 21st-century social movements? I found out that activist videos are the storytellers of the movements in a world of fake news.
PARTICIPATORY CURATORIAL PROJECTS:
Memory Box of the Federal German Migrant Women’s Association in Bibliothek der Generationen, historical museum Frankfurt
The principal intention of the participatory museum project is to archive the history of migrant women from the perspective of documenting their struggles through the years, achievements in the present day, and goals for the future.
Archival materials in the reminiscence box—produced in a series of workshops—are basically instruments for women to tell their own stories, and it includes a short storybook, choir recording, 10 years anniversary book, a short documentary, etc. Nevertheless, posters, flyers, press releases, campaigning materials, and especially their periodical publication “Woman” represent migrant women’s memory in Germany. Additionally, the project includes two participatory exhibitions: Firstly, “ABC of Migrant Women Association: A Female Dictionary” (Cologne, 2015; Frankfurt, 2016; İstanbul, 2016; Berlin, 2017), an A to Z list of visual and textual interrogation of socially constructed words, objects, emotions, and even colors; secondly, “World from Female Perspective!” (Berlin, 2017), exposing colorful, fighter, and collaborator environment of migrant women through photo albums, and various artistic installations. In this manner, this paper aims to discuss participatory curatorial practices in the project and archival materials representing female memory coming from Turkey and currently based in Germany.