Conversations on Urban Farming & Healthy Eating
Most of the time, we are busy doing something--both growing food and preparing food are quite labor intensive activities. Fortunately, we usually have people around to chat--restaurant guests, visitors, volunteers, etc. We also run more formal courses and workshops where we have an audience. But sometimes we feel the urge of sharing a piece of knowledge that we find relevant, or a specific technique that we think might be useful to others. And we also want to listen to our community to understand what the urgent issues are, and what else we can do together. For those purposes, we organize informal get-togethers every last Wednesday of the month between 6pm-7pm at our Taksim location. Usually YE İÇ offers something to taste while EK BİÇ presents a question to discuss. There is a nominal entry fee (currently 60₺) to make sure everybody is motivated to participate in the discussion, but it can be waved for regular attendees. Please follow our Instagram account for updates.
Volunteer Program
Volunteering is an awe-inspiringly generous act. In our times, when we are all so busy, and money seems to be the end goal, it is almost inconceivable that people give their time to a cause without an expectation to be paid in return. Hence, it has been a huge privilege for us to have had the support of volunteers from our very early days. It has also been a confirmation that we are on the right path, and should keep going.
Volunteering can also be extremely rewarding. In this relationship, no money may be changing hands, but there certainly needs to be some sort of exchange happening to keep the deal fair and worthwhile for all involved. It is not easy to run a volunteer program, either--after 8 years of practice, we are still learning... But we hope that we manage to offer a safe and pleasant environment to learn new skills and practice those skills purposefully while enjoying a camaraderie that makes going back a pleasure.
If you have any interest and/or experience in activism, farming, cooking, teaching, designing, or building, and are wondering what you can do to make a difference with your time and effort on your own and others' quality of life in our big city, then we suggest dropping us a note here. Look forward to hearing from you!
Collective Çukurcuma Community Library
Initiated by Collective Çukurcuma, this modest library aims to grow over time by bringing books and people together, and creating a community around words that are written, read, and shared. The hope is that this one will inspire others in different neighborhoods so that books will circulate in wider circles, and keep connecting people through the ideas they contain.
Collective Çukurcuma was founded in Istanbul in 2015 by Naz Cuguoğlu and Mine Kaplangı and was joined by Serhat Cacekli in 2017. Their experiments mainly focus on collaborative thinking and writing through their reading group meetings, international collaborative exhibitions, curatorial and editorial projects, and public programs. They organize these projects by highlighting the potential of transdisciplinary collaborations within contemporary art and making use of process-based rather than outcome-based research with an intuitive approach.