Arts Lab 6.0: Sinem Sağdıç - Month 4

Salut. Greetings from the fourth day of the project. We started the day rushing for the Christmas Market in Iași. In my team, there were Sona, Saleh, and Ziad. Sona and Ziad went to Iași to organize the Christmas Market, while Saleh and I stayed in Târgu Frumos. For the market, I worked on VR in a cafe and a pizza restaurant. It was hard to attract people's interest, and not many were engaged, but we still managed to raise a bit of money. Sona got very sick that day, and when we returned home, I suddenly fell ill and lost my voice. Soon after, everyone in the house got sick with the same symptoms. We were coughing a lot, which made it really difficult for us to work. But health comes before work.

In the following days, we held our last exhibition before the two-week break. We organized it at a cafe in Iași called "Negru Zi." It’s a very nice cafe that we had visited before, but it was quite small. Very few people came to the exhibition. On the same day, we went to the police station to get our residence permits and joked about each other's ID photos because it’s an important tradition. :)

The day for Secret Santa had arrived, and I had to buy a gift for Luca. Honestly, I struggled a bit because there weren’t many places to shop in Târgu Frumos, and it was too late to order anything online. Still, I was happy with what I found. On the same day, we exchanged gifts. We guessed some Secret Santas correctly, while others were surprises. My Secret Santa was Mihaela, but it wasn’t hard to figure out since my gifts always arrived when she was home.

Before starting the two-week winter break, I made plans to go to Hungary. I was going to stay in Budapest for a week. Honestly, making this plan was very challenging because it was hard to align flight and train schedules properly, but I managed. We all felt sad as people began leaving for their travels because it felt as if the project had ended and everyone was going home. We knew that wasn’t the case, but it felt like a rehearsal for the future. A day before leaving for Budapest, our refrigerator broke down. I felt the need to mention this because a broken fridge is a crisis moment. I had to put my food on the balcony.

The next day, I set off for Budapest. I spent the entire day on a bus and plane. I stayed in a hostel for a week and visited many tourist attractions like the Parliament building, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Heroes' Square. Some people had put stickers on the Chain Bridge over the Danube River. I added my own sticker too. :) Non-touristic places I visited for personal reasons were Atatürk's statue and the zoo. I went to place flowers at Atatürk's statue. As for the zoo, I was very excited, but the sections with the animals I wanted to see were temporarily closed. Still, I was happy to see animals I hadn’t seen before. The last day of my trip was December 31st. I returned to Târgu Frumos just a few hours before the New Year. Saleh, Ziad, and I went to the park to watch the fireworks. It was beautiful.

After the holiday, Sona and her mother came to the house. Everyone was very excited to have a mother in the house. You’d often magically find the kitchen clean or your dishes washed. :) Sona’s mother made us lots of delicious dishes for Armenian night. She also brought walnut sujuk from Armenia. I might have eaten half of it because it’s a dessert I love.

We didn’t skip our meetings either. We made plans for the MARr exhibition. I wanted to do something related to Tarot cards, but I didn’t want to do Tarot readings because I couldn’t take on that responsibility. Also, Tarot reading isn’t easy. Instead, I created a storytelling game that we could play with Tarot cards. As an art piece, I made a collage of the Major Arcana cards. It took a very long time to complete the collage because I used so many images.

This month was a mix of exhaustion and adventure because I went on a trip in the middle of the month. I’m not sure if the trip helped me rest since I didn’t go home and had to do a lot of planning for the travel. But I don’t regret it—I needed to visit another country and spend some time alone.

Report written by Sinem Sağdıç, she's from Turkey and she's one of the 14 volunteers participating in Arts Lab 6.0, a project co-funded by the European Union through the European Solidarity Corps program.