Dialogues

Karar verdik. Gölü bisikletle geçeceğiz.
Decision Made. We Are Crossing the Lake by Bicycle.¹

I don’t know how to swim, so water remains unfamiliar territory to me. I love the bicycle: casual, accessible, always ready to carry more than expected. My bike has a faulty gear, a loose chain, and a bent fender. It demands a gentle approach. It is better to travel at night. 

I learnt how to ride quite late. My engagement with art universities also came late, but quickly, as if trying to make up for all the years that had passed. Once I entered that world, I worked at institutions focused on diversity, inclusion, and social justice. These institutions often seemed to know their intended outcomes before their programs had even begun. Even though this signals a systemic absurdity we might all agree on, I found myself wondering: in my own work, how often did I already know the outcome from the start?

Crossing the lake by bicycle means doing something constantly—keeping the pedals turning (maintenance)—while also learning how to swim, in the water, and while cycling. There is so much life around us, and at some point, the sentences quietly shifted from “I” to “we.”

Here, “we” is sometimes just me and myself. Almost always, it is Ece Gökalp and me, co-founders of Orta Okul. Sometimes it is us and the marine species: shorter-term collaborators and participants. And sometimes, it is our wider habitat: a cloud of activists, feminists, dreamers, and weirdos who inspire us. 

Much of the institutional work on diversity and inclusion felt performative to us. The institutions themselves were so dominant that these policies seemed to serve their image more than the bodies and groups they were supposedly centered on. We were trying to learn art, make art, survive. We hold onto our passion while juggling within a system where institutions, not life, stand at the center. 

And then, we found each other. After countless conversations, often interrupted by excitement and urgency, Ece and I founded Orta Okul. 

Decision made. We are crossing the lake by bicycle.
Karar verdik. Gölü bisikletle geçeceğiz.

Orta Okul, meaning Middle School, was born from big dreams and strong intentions. Initially, we described it as an arts and crafts school that invites communities to be co-creators, particularly those excluded from art education due to barriers such as socioeconomic status, social class, or age. Over time, we began to shape its identity as multilingual and nomadic. 

Then, our areas of struggle became clearer: We focused on educational justice, anti-institutional art, participation, and reclaiming public space. With each new conversation and collaboration, Orta Okul gained more layers. Eventually, we began asking ourselves how we could remain engaged with so many issues while working with limited resources. 

This led us to rethink what the school could be. It became a mobile structure mounted on a bicycle trailer, carrying all its materials and traveling to (semi-)public spaces, associations, schools, shelters, and neighborhood houses. In each educational program, we began collaborating with local organizations, art spaces, and individuals to activate existing community resources. Beyond its physical form, this mobile and adaptable structure also started to reflect precarious stories, such as those of migration, displacement, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities.

Each educational program we organize is shaped by the needs, resources, and intentions of its participants. Every occasion borrows something from Orta Okul’s toolbox of struggles and tactics, and transforms it into something new. In this way, the school remains impossible to define fully. It moves across boundaries, embraces the flexibility of transition, and carries the responsibility of drawing new lines when necessary. This fluidity also pushes us away from fixed methodologies and pre-designed models. 

Since it is impossible to cover everything in one text, I will focus on a more modest aim. I want to explain, as clearly as possible, the three core principles that continue to guide our work.

Art with the community, not art for the community. Orta Okul is grounded in co-making. We support collaborative artistic practices that evolve through dialogue and shared experiences, rather than through the representation or reproduction of a community by an outside artist. For us, participation means more than just being present. It involves the redistribution of power. As Claire Bishop writes in Artificial Hells, quoting Guy Debord: “Participation rehumanizes a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production.”² In this way, participation challenges traditional art models, which often focus on final products and are commodified, thereby removing them from their social context. 

An artwork does not become participatory just by including people. Many of the projects we designed with participation in mind ultimately became events where participants chose not to participate. In some cases, the work did not resonate and remained symbolic. 

Still, each of these attempts became an opportunity to learn. By reflecting on what did not work, we began to understand what could. For example, when the curriculum was intentionally left light, shifting from a set of instructions to a series of open-ended questions, it created space for people to engage. A curriculum that breathes invites co-ownership. Trust also grew when facilitators came from within the community and shared lived experiences with participants. This kind of resonance made engagement feel natural and immediate. 

One example was the Grupa Podrške (Support Group) seminar facilitated by Jelena Fužinato.³ It brought together women from BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian) backgrounds who had given a pause to their art careers due to gendered reasons. Jelena herself was part of this community. Her presence built trust from the very beginning. Eventually, the group continued independently of Orta Okul and became a collective of its own. This was something we were oddly proud of stepping back.

Maintenance over development. This principle is inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art,⁴ where she contrasts the glorified idea of development with the often invisible labor of maintenance. She committed to valuing maintenance, what, as she put it, takes “all the fucking time.” 

In this spirit, Orta Okul prioritizes care, sustainability, and community engagement over the constant search for the new, the exciting, or the prestigious.

Maintenance demands long-term commitment. The difficulty lies in balancing energy, time, and funding. We keep returning to the same questions: What happens when the resources run out? Who continues the work— the initiators, the participants, or the institution? 

At Orta Okul, we respond by starting small. We design our seminars as short-term programs, four sessions, not just to introduce a topic but also to meet participants and see whether something deeper might develop. If the interest is there, we find ways to continue together. 

Last year, thanks to a rare and almost utopian opportunity, Ece and I co-created an educational program that lasted more than a year. We met the group every week and focused, on average, two days each week on this project. After nearly eleven months, one of the participants called it “our project”. This moment (which I did not witness and only know through Ece’s retelling) felt like a quiet arrival. Orta Okul had become what we had aimed for. As a group, we had begun with hesitation and disconnection. We established a shared space of trust as we invested time. And we stayed. 

Sometimes, things do not click. What is required of us is to stay and to keep showing up until we become familiar with it. This led to the final principle of Orta Okul.

Participants before curriculum. This principle draws inspiration from Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 in North Carolina, which nurtured community life rather than enforcing fixed curricula. The 1952 Prospectus declared that “the student, rather than the curriculum, is the proper center of the general education.”⁵ The school’s discomfort with the word “school” echoes Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society,⁶ which challenged the belief that education must take the form of formal instruction, certificates, and titles. 

At Orta Okul, we build our structure around social justice, participation, and safer space practices, while encouraging participants to shape the specifics of the curriculum with us. Facilitators are not selected for their titles, but for their flexibility and ability to connect with the group. The pace of a seminar, the materials it uses, and even the space where it unfolds are all shaped through collective dialogue between the Orta Okul team, participants, facilitators, and sometimes caregivers.

By now, I am no longer sure how much of what I have written reflects what truly happened, and how much belongs to what we hoped would happen. That uncertainty may be a natural part of the process. One way to keep this school alive is to value small, everyday victories. 

What we try to center –in contrast to the systems we observe, read about, or resist– is something nomadic rather than fixed, fluid rather than standardized, alive rather than institutional. And more often than not, it includes a deep appreciation for lightness and the small-scale.

In the end, crossing the lake by bicycle becomes easier when we stop trying to turn it into a ship. Instead of growing into an institution, Orta Okul might discover new paths by staying small, holding onto its simplicity, and showing up, week after week.

1.  Bener, V. O. (n.d.). Yorumsuz. In Kapan (pp. 41–42). ↩︎
2.  Bishop, C. (2023). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso books. ↩︎
3.  See: https://www.ortaokul.info/2024/grupapodrske ↩︎
4.  Ukeles, M. L. (2018). Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition Care. Journal of Contemporary Painting, 4(2), 233-238. ↩︎
5.  Black Mountain College. (1952). Black Mountain College Prospectus for Spring Semester, February 11–June 7, 1952. Reprinted in V. Katz (Ed.), Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (p. 202). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ↩︎
6.  Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society; Ivan D. Illich. Calder and Boyars. ↩︎

Ipek Çınar is an artist and researcher working predominantly with participatory and socially engaged art practices. She uses play, joy, and unexpected encounters as means of expression. She studied Political Science at METU Ankara and Art in Context at UdK Berlin, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside her artistic production, she also works in the field of anti-discrimination and social justice. İpek Çınar loves the word “Orta” (Middle): She is co-editor of Orta Format and is a co-founder of Orta Okul.