Seçil Yaylalı

Porta Pila Art Market

with 6secondsTO

2012, Turin

mixed materials

in the context of Generazione Creativa, promoted by Compagnia San Paolo

in collaboration with AsiloBianco, PasaJist, Kotti-Shop, Zico House

supported by Città di Torino, GAI, Circoscrizione 3, Circoscrizione 7

with the text contribution of Giovanni Semi and Elena Lanfranchini, Stefania Gavin, Davide Vanotti and Elena Pugliese and the help of Fabio Bonfanti and Nicole Riefolo 

 

Porta Pila Art Market was an art stall located inside a seven square meters block in the food section of Porta Palazzo market in Turin, Europe’s largest open-air market. It involved eight artists from Italy, Turkey, Germany, and Lebanon through the collaboration with the cultural associations AsiloBianco (Ameno), PasaJist (Istanbul), Kotti-Shop (Berlin), and Zico House (Beirut). Every week, a couple of artists worked inside the stall as resident artists, for an overall month-long art residency program.

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The market of Porta Palazzo is an extremely lively place for grocery and social relations, where both local and migrant shop owners and workers, gypsy communities, tourists, homeless, middle-class and low-income people from inside and outside the neighborhood every day mix and interact. 

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PPAM aimed at building an empathetic environment with the people inside the marketplace, creating opportunities for emotional and cultural exchange for them and the artists. Instead of economic transitions, art interactions took place in the stall, through site-specific and process-based projects that each artist developed with the participation of regulars and passers-by. The market became a place to experiment with new models of communication and interaction between art and life, addressing a public who is mostly new to contemporary art languages.

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Porta Pila Art Market hosted the following projects: 5senses-map by NoNameSinceNow, Museo popolare di Porta Palazzo by Seçil Yaylalı, Porta Pila Cookbook by Eugenia Demeglio, Ricordi da Porta Palazzo by Stefan Endewardt, La Poltrona di Porta Palazzo by Giuseppe Bisceglia, Fair-Trade Free Market by Marta Bogda ska & Sarah Farahat, The Mall World by Debora Fede & Elena Givone and Scegli un oggetto by Burçak Konukman.