A New Design Means Taking Risks
When I Look Back makes the reader a partner to a designer’s life’s breaking points, to the difficult decisions like sustainability, carbon footprint, production-consumption balance in the design process. We leave footprints with everything we do, we read, we produce during our lifetimes. Özlem Tuna is someone that records almost all her footprints. As much as the ones that saw the light of day, designers have tens of ideas and trials that never did; left behind in notebooks, sketches, computer files. This book also contains courage as it leaves the designer completely open and transparent in front of the reader and the design world.
When I Look Back presents the reader with interesting experiences among its pages. A small piece created by mixing and drying the vegetable wastes of the workshop, onion skins, lemon and orange peels, paper pulp is within the book; you can touch and smell it. Similarly, a tiny porcelain that was hand-shaped, color glazed, and produced for the book; and a little piece of pressed brass created from the metal lathe leftovers of the Grand Bazaar workshops are also inside the book.
We asked Özlem Tuna the origins of this book and exhibition project.
Özlem Tuna: Actually, this book was a project that I long dreamed of. I would do it one day, but I couldn’t say when. Everything moves rapidly in the design world. It’s as if you’re racing time itself when you design a product while at the same time considering its economic value, sustainability, problem or need solving property, consumer appeal, and solving problems that raise during the production. I worked in this tempo for long years. Just like everyone else, this pandemic made me slow down, too. In those days, I thought the time for this book has come. I can say it came out be due to;
- To see what I could and couldn’t do,
- To recognize my successes and failures,
- Trying to understand my change with my designs and products while the world was changing with what we do and gathering my courage to calmly put these on paper.
What would you say if we were to say that İstanbul is a second protagonist in your book; it’s as if you’re thanking the city?
Absolutely correct. I used to work in the Historic Peninsula. Nowadays I work in another open-air museum that has Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque – one of Sinan’s (the Architect) most elegant buildings, and other historic structures like Tophane-i Amire, Liceo Italiano, and Palazzo di Venezia.
As someone who has chosen to think and produce with design methodology as a vocation, I often feel İstanbul is a very correct city to live and create something in. Meeting with a baker, or a tailor that makes custom shirts, or a carpenter, or a smith in the back streets; entering their small shops and workshops, and chatting with the masters there are still educative moments for me. I can say that the inspiration for many of my designs was İstanbul and the cultures She contains.
The book contains beautiful shots by photography artists Ahmet Görsev, Erdoğan Altındiş, M. Serdar Şamlı, Serhat Özşen, and Sibel Kutlusoy.
How did the book transform into an Exhibition? I should actually ask this question to Zeynep Özler, Communications Manager for Kale Tasarım ve Sanat Merkezi.
Özlem Tuna: It was actually a surprise for me, too. But first, I want to say something. This is a book; but just like a design process, many hands touched it. It’s almost as if there was a collective labor behind it. I want to once more thank anyone that touched the book during this process.
While I was still excited for my first book, our excitement multiplied when KTSM Communications Manager Zeynep Özler came up with the idea of an exhibition based on this book. With the faith Zeynep Bodur of Kale Group had on the project, the gallery at the entrance of KTSM, which is located in the middle of small workshops and craftspeople in Perşembe Pazarı became our exhibition hall.
Zeynep Özler: As KTSM, we prioritize unique and free projects that touch the core. With the “İyi Bak Dünyana (Take Good Care of Your World)” movement that we have started, we believe the world will become a better place with art and design. And we try to provide room for artists and designers that work for this goal by calling for responsible production and consumption.
When we first went to Özlem Tuna with the idea of creating an exhibition from her first book, she got very excited while at the same time she began to think on how. At the end, it turned out to be a groundbreaking, impressive, and interactive exhibition. “When I Look Back” exhibition that we will experience with all five of our senses tells us to touch, listen, watch, eat, drink, and dream. We invite everyone to visit Kale Tasarım ve Sanat Merkezi in Perşembe Pazarı until March 11th…
“touch, listen, watch, eat, drink, and dream”
Recently, in a chat meeting held in KTSM on the book and the exhibition (https://youtu.be/Z92nwFkVL64), Sertaç Ersayın who is board member of World Design Organization defined the book and the exhibition as “a journey inside” and interpreted them as follows:
“I have watched Özlem Tuna’s design journey for a very long time, and she’s also my friend. Being understanding, being collective, being creative while conserving the productivity, being sincere… These are some of the adjectives that we use when we define Özlem… She carried over these properties into her book, too. I read “When I Look Back” also as “When I Look Inside.” I remember the early pandemic days when our offices were closed, when we couldn’t travel – even within the city that we started to meet in ports to work on the book by chatting over her drafts. I think this has also been a work to overcome the limitations of this period.
It is a book of a process where we rebuilt our design language each time that started with an idea, and where we considered all ecological and environmental factors while presenting the output due to good observations and analysis.
The exhibition expresses the book’s soul and feeling outstandingly. It expresses the experiences, feelings and their togetherness wonderfully. Where can this journey take us? You might Look Back when leaving the exhibition hall and dream of rebuilding your way forward.