Pelin Tan

Sociologist/Art Historian based in Mardin/Turkiye. Head of the Film Dept., Fine Arts Faculty, University of Batman. Senior researcher at the Center for Design, Arts and Social Research (Boston). 6th recipient of Keith Haring Art&Activism (2019, New York). Lead Author of Towards an Urban Society (Cambridge Univ.Press, 2018) edited by S.Sassen and E.Peitersen, the International Panel of Social Progress. Her current short documentary “Landscapes as Archives” is about the production of architecture in Palestine and Al Mashrou supported by the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023). With Vidokle she produced “The Fall of Artists’ Republic” in Tripoli/Lebanon (2014). Her last film "Gılgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep" (2022) supported by Sharjah Film Platform. Agonistic Assemblies (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024), From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ.Press, 2017), Refugee Heritage (2021), Designing Modernity: Architecture in the Arab World 1945-1973 (Jovis, 2022), Urgencies in Architectural Theories (Columbia Univ.Press, 2015). Forthcoming: “Forms of Non-Belonging” E-flux books.

​

I have been involved with pedagogical practices for twenty years, and in that time, I have challenged myself to rethink what knowledge production is, to question institutional structures, and to produce in situ methodologies for meaningful engagements in urban space and social justice. Being educated in sociology and art history and having a practice “outside” of academia led to a long struggle with methodologies. After working in the architecture and art theory and history programs at the Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture from 2001 to 2012, I sought out, with my architect colleagues, urban and social justice engagements in Istanbul, which hit its peak with the Gezi Park resistance in 2013. I should mention that my experience in urban activism and socially engaged art coincided with my academic work, which was supported by my PhD advisor Susanne von Falkenhausen at Humboldt University of Berlin, and my postdoc mentor Prof. Dr. Ute Meta Bauer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who always provided support and discussion on the role of architecture in the struggle for rights. For me, it is essential to initiate collective unlearning environments while also questioning the body of educational institutions. As a methodology, taking action on-site, meaningfully creating improvised methods, and thinking about de/archiving as an alternative method have been vital for my pedagogical approach.

 

In 2013, at the invitation of my colleagues, I moved to Mardin, in the southeast of Turkey, a primarily Kurdish region, to be a part of a new experimental architecture faculty. This was an experience of both success and failure: the intense sociopolitical pressure and also the variety of architectural pedagogical practices led the institution to fail, in a sense, but it was an experience from which I learned a lot. We were very close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders, and while trying to maintain and restructure an alternative curriculum and socially engaged education, the flow of migration from Syria started. The urban conflict and surveillance in Kurdish cities, including Mardin, Nusaybin, Kızıltepe, and Diyarbakır, was unbearable. Surviving day-to-day became a struggle that consumed the energy one needs for students and colleagues. Sometimes our collective classes, design studios, and on-site workshops became spaces for us to practice solidarity and sustain our collective energy. Failure can be important in experimental pedagogical practices under pressure of censorship or fascist threats, as well as the constraint of acting collectively. It is something like one step forward, two steps back. It is always important to instill pedagogies with comradeship and collective narratives of survival that exist outside of institutionalism.

 

Collaborating with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, Pelin began to focus more on decolonizing pedagogical methodologies in art, urban design, and architecture. My students in Mardin were mostly Kurds and Arabs from the region. So, to operate in this context, first, I had to deal with linguistic and cultural differences and the daily intense political agenda of the region, which is a bit similar to the situation in the West Bank

 

Refugee camps, as sites of unlearning where pedagogies provide a commoning practice, are vital to my learning in survival and temporariness. 

​

Urgent Pedagogies came out of the need to bring together many practices and experiences as an alliance and to talk to each other about our struggles.

 

Living archives offer a vital methodology to map practices: an urgent pedagogical experience in one condition and region might link to another practice that is in another place and responds to a different kind of urgency. I think each pedagogical initiative, whether long-term or temporary, comes from its own sociopolitical history and practice of social struggle.