improvising ensemble
Doğaçlama Ansambul (appl. in 2022)
Historic neighborhoods are frequently assessed through established value frameworks, where aesthetic evaluation often remains confined to judgments of beauty or ugliness. Such perspectives risk overlooking the lived, emotional, and relational dimensions that truly give meaning to place. We were motivated to challenge this limitation by reframing aesthetics as a spatial and affective experience. Rather than treating heritage as a static object of preservation, we approached it as a dynamic environment shaped by memory, perception, and shared human presence.
Improvising Ensemble assesses the significance of a historic Ankara neighborhood while contributing to grounded conservation strategies. Central to this aim is the recognition of human connection as a core component of heritage value. By foregrounding shared experiences and emotional responses, Improvising Ensemble encourages a deeper, sensorial engagement with the site. Through an open learning environment, participants are invited to express emotions freely, expand their creative capacities, and collectively construct a more nuanced understanding of the neighborhood’s cultural, architectural, and experiential layers.
Improvising Ensemble introduces an interdisciplinary approach that integrates performative and audiovisual arts into place experience. By merging music with spatial exploration, it transforms how participants relate to a neighborhood’s history, culture, and aesthetics. Rather than relying on conventional interpretive methods, participants co-generate music in real time, creating a collective, in-situ experience that unfolds directly within the site. Through interactive video-making, they translate affective and embodied interpretations into creative narratives. By positioning performative arts as an integral component of spatial understanding, the program opens unexpected pathways for seeing, feeling, and reflecting on place, allowing chaotic or complex environments to reveal new layers of meaning. Thereby, conservation becomes not only analytical but experiential, embodied, and collectively imagined.
The program unfolds in five interconnected phases. In Sensory Activation, participants engage in a quiet neighborhood expedition, observing and experiencing the site through multiple senses while documenting individual impressions. During Documentation, these experiences are recorded and collectively shared through a digital platform. The Search of New Expressions phase invites participants to explore artistic interfaces including poetry, drawing, photography, video, and music, that articulate spatial and affective responses. In Skill Development, participants receive training in video-making and vocalization. Finally, in Co-creation, they collaboratively produce creative videos that capture both individual and collective interpretations, while exploring and vocalizing the neighborhood’s timbre under the guidance of a professional choir.
Improvising Ensemble culminated at the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Contemporary Arts Center, where participants presented their manifestos on the historic site accompanied by performances of the Muammer Sun Choir, followed by screenings of their creative videos.
Main Goal
Improvising Ensemble integrates music into the experience of place to reconnect people with a neighborhood’s history, culture, architecture, and sensory character. Through collective, in-situ music-making, participants actively engage with their surroundings, co-producing the musicality of the place. These shared interpretations are then transformed into creative video expressions, allowing personal and collective readings of place to become visible, audible, and experientially grounded.
Art Interfaces
Improvised music making, accompanying a choir, creative video making.
Place/s
In Ulus, Ankara’s Jewish neighborhood carries layered traces of exile, survival, and urban transformation. Shaped by Sephardic Jews after the Ottoman era, it flourished through trade, ritual, and tightly knit everyday life centered on the synagogue. With Ankara’s modernization, the neighborhood gradually declined, yet its silenced streets still hold a powerful collective memory embedded within historic urban fabric of Ulus, and quietly shaping perceptions of place.
Story
Historic places are often evaluated through predefined value frameworks, with aesthetic value commonly reduced to judgments of beauty or ugliness. This project set out to challenge that limitation by reframing aesthetics as a lived, emotional, and spatial experience. By foregrounding affect, the project aimed to cultivate deeper, sensorial, and more meaningful connections between people and historic environments.
Starting from this perspective, participants from city planning and architecture programs, after developing an understanding of the site’s historical and architectural context, produced affective maps of the neighborhood. These maps were initially expressed through artistic references and visual materials sourced by the participants, which then informed the development of creative video scenarios based on their experiential readings of the place.
In pursuit of this, participants collectively generated music in real time, creating a dynamic, in-situ experience in collaboration with a nationally recognized choir. Through an interactive video-making interface, their affective interpretations were translated into creative audiovisual narratives, expanding the ways historic places can be perceived and understood.