FilBooks, Istanbul

FiLBooks Istanbul Cemre Yesil invited DER GREIF to do a workshop for the inauguration of her bookshop FilBooks, located in Istanbuls Karaköy district. We had 4 days of intense work and exchange. The workshop attendants produced image-combinations, working with their own images, but also with images from the vernacular archive »Early Paintings. The result of the workshop is a collaborative zine, featuring image-combinations by all workshop attendants.

The artistic directors of DER GREIF, Leon Kirchlechner and Simon Karlstetter, offer a workshop for photography students and professionals. The workshop transfers aspects of DER GREIF’s artistic photographic practice and experiments with diverse possibilities of how to work with photography in the digital era. The team of DER GREIF is looking for a dialogue in which both parties – participants and directors – receive new impulses. This process is supported by the fact that the workshop is held by two directors with different approaches and artistic practices.

At the beginning of each workshop, DER GREIF shares insights into the project and its history, development and concept. As starting point the workshop-participants bring around 50 photographs as digital files; either complete series/works or single images. After building small groups, the participants select single images that they want to work with from this archive. These single images are then edited and placed in newly created contexts. Coherent, new combinations from various different origin-contexts evolve from this process.

These combinations build the basis for new works that don’t necessarily show a classical narrative structure.