Interview by Christabel Stewart
Portrait by Bige Yalin

CS You’ve got such an illustrious CV, I don’t know where to start, but maybe we’ll begin here in Bodrum. How did your role begin?

JS The festival director Sahir Erozan and I met in Venice during the last Venice Biennale, and he invited me to the first edition of MedBodrum in 2024, as a guest. At the end, he asked me what my vision would be for the second year. I told him that I would create art, not as something hanging on the wall or sitting as a sculpture on the floor, but a connection that immerses the audience in a story from arrival to departure. This site is already very magical, but art will bring another level of magic, where you will not know if you are in reality or fiction. What fascinated me at this festival was the uniqueness of its form. It’s a human-scale festival by invitation only, so it consists of a crowd of people who, for three days, live together, experience the art together – artists, chefs, creators, guests. You may meet people here who will change your life, and the stage is for everyone. You choose where to be, and how you interact. Where else in the world can you meet an artist you have seen on stage, cooking for you in the kitchen? Normally, people are busy running from one place to another. In London, Paris, New York, Berlin, you run from dinner to a concert, and if you meet someone new, you say hi, shake hands, and nothing happens. Here, we can live in this extraordinary moment of extended time. For me, that is the most important thing, this slowdown.

CS You aren’t living in information overload? 

JS Yes, because there’s no obligation of any kind – you’re together, to enjoy the time and the people, and enjoy the possible, improbable connections. Normally, if I go to a restaurant, I don’t meet the chef. Maybe they come out of the kitchen for one second and shake hands with three people. Here, you can spend an entire day with them, and you can do the same with a visual artist, or a musician. They are leaving their stages to be with us.

CS I wanted to touch on the sociopolitical context. Turkey has an extreme right-wing government right now. Was that something that informed how you think about the process?

JS We are all aware where we are. It’s complex, but it’s important not to ignore it, because for every country, it’s a complex moment. In the last decade, all our paradigms have shifted. When I was young, I thought history was like a train – always going in a better direction. It was like a Hollywood movie. But now, we can see there is no happy ending. You can look east, west, north, south – everywhere has a problem. Even when I look at my own country, France, I’m very concerned. Italy is becoming crazy, and you can see all over Europe, there is a rise of something we don’t want to see. It’s like we all have a problem with our own families. We have to be resilient. We have to be together, and remember that we need each other.

CS I was hoping for something philosophic from French curators of your standard. You’ve chosen Turkish artists to work with here. Is it a collaboration, or do they have carte blanche? 

JS The way I work with artists is always the same, it’s a dialogue. Some of my colleagues prefer to stay in their institutions, but I’m not interested in that. It’s too protected and isolated. I love to take art to other territories. I want more people to understand what art can bring to your perspective, your philosophical point of view on life in general. To help with the creative vision, I chose :mentalKLINIK, an extraordinary artistic duo from Istanbul, but who have an international career, and a non-local vocabulary. What I love in their work is that they use the lexicon of the entertainment world, but twist it. The title we chose for the festival is “Terribly Happy,” which fits so well with the time we were living. We’re having a terrible time, but we need to be happy to survive. 

CS Why did you choose the linguistics of entertainment? You could have gone for something more historical, going back to the Greeks, but perhaps you’re more interested in creating new histories?

JS Tonight, we’re going to go to an archaeological site. This country has so much history. Yet you see the columns, the ruins, but it’s linked to what we’re doing. We are building a permanent ruin. I wanted to show the past, but with the light of the present. Many of us live in archaeological sites – Paris, Venice, London. I wanted to invite artists like :mentalKLINIK to take us immediately from the far past to the future. You can never look at the past with the eyes of yesterday, no matter how many books you read. I will never have the same eyes, the same behaviour. History is made to be reinvented, re-read, and re-understood with the eyes of today. This is what artists do – they bring hyper-realities, the hyper present today, to vocabulary that comes from a long way back. .