Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

About the exhibition by Oda Projesi:

Libi Perez de Silas de Castro and Ólafur Árni Ólafsson who were participating to a six months programme at Istanbul worked for one month together with Oda Projesi and children of Galata. The working process has been exposed to the viewers by an installation in “The Room: An Exhibition Space”. The core of the work was language. Since there was not a common, given language they could share, they invented a coded language arisen out of their communication with the neighbourhood people. Since this language consisted of electric words, and was ready to be molded every moment, they named it the “plastic language”. Inspired by the dynamics of the neighbourhood, they created an installation in the Room that they called “environment”. The walls of the Room were covered with mud, various spices were scattered in the corners, the main entrance and the light of the room were changed and throughout two weeks until the closing, space was in the permanent process of transformation. The pictures made by children were engraved into the mud and as the illustrations got blurred in time due to mud’s nature, the children came and fixed them every day, thus the room became a structure in motion that gets changed and transformed in the process.

At the tea parties they organised at the opening and closing ceremonies  of the exhibition, they made letter-formed cookies together with children, wrote with these cookies the words of the plastic language, then ate them together with the guests, hence destroyed this language by eating it.