Arts, Writings and Women 'Crossing' in Istanbul

This contribution presents the “Exile Writing workshop”, a collaborative project that took place in Istanbul (Sep. 2011), in occasion on the 17th International Symposium of Electronic Arts – ISEA. We will introduce the aims and the aspirations that informed this collective work, carried out by some PhD and MA students from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, under the supervision of Prof. Silvana Carotenuto, and with the participation of women, artists and scholars coming from different backgrounds and countries. The main output of the workshop has been a series of artistic ‘gestures’ – videos, photos and digital works – interrogating issues of female exile and displacement, and which are all collected and displayed on a website. Each peace of work is a personal act of storytelling, which provide another way to narrate the poetics of exile. This collaborative encounter between different women and their arts, in the city of Istanbul, has been interpreted trough the ‘crossing’ trope, a movement and a gesture, which seems to ‘materialize’ the critical understanding of the multiple ways in which postcolonial, political and poetical, practices might emerge and intertwine.