Souvenirs reproduce (and sometimes recreate) elements of history and culture. As promotional items, they are bought and circulated by visitors as samples of local memory, though rarely do they speak to the cities’ contemporary and everyday life. The result is the diffusion of a distorted image of a place – one with which the locals themselves are often unfamiliar.
This workshop uses the “souvenir” as a topic for recognizing cultural identity in a place, and to materialize this as new memory-objects — creating new archetypes that foster discussion of representation (and reproduction) of what might be considered endemic and authentic in a globalized era.
Project Team: The Home Project, Avşar Gürpınar, Özgür Atlagan
