welcome to oasis community! Oasis is a notebook which turns into an autobiographical map when its finished by its user. You cannot find any map that will show the true places. However, you are able to create this map by yourself through Oasis. Oasis focuses on how the “house” constructed through objects, memories, time and connections. In the Poetics of Spaces, Gaston Bachelard writes the house is “the topography of our intimate being”, both the repository of memory and the lodging of the soul. Our house is our corner of the world, and it is inside of us. House is a powerful symbol of our past and identity. Through little cues about the house, Oasis enables the user to dream and to remember about oneself. It will lead you to peaceful dreams and profound observations. In the end, your Oasis will look like the world you recognise both inside and outside of yourself. Oasis is not for collecting, communicating or reflecting. It just provides a space for creation and realisation. Remember, analysing and accepting yourself takes time. Oasis could be the first step for that. If you can finish your Oasis in the two weeks, this will be perfect as a first step. Besides, while you are completing your Oasis, stay with yourself, be alone. As Deleuze writes in Negotiations, “it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” Oasis intended to be an intimate map of your world. All poems, prose of all kinds, photographs, sketches, drawings, tickets, charts, and diagrams are welcome. You can ended up hanging your Oasis on your wall. instagram: oasis.community e-mail: talk.to.oasis.community@gmail.com
FRAMEWORK Drift, wander
The derive or drift was defined by the Situationist as the “technique of locomotion without a goal“ which is very similar to Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur. According to Walter Benjamin, a flâneur sees auras in the city. Also, Benjamin addresses that the aura appears in things from nature but only when the observer is relaxed and accepts things as they are. Therefore, the perception of an aura together with the perception of the relaxed state of one’s own body. Wandering around the city can shed some light on the relation between the self and its environment (Gestures: Atmospheric Perception and Architecture, Ton Verstegen, ArtEZ Press, 2009). Our everyday experiences in the city or our travels in different cities helps us to recognise the world both inside and outside of ourselves. In Oasis the concept of the “flâneur” is used as a methodological framework within the investigation of what our everyday and past experiences within the space can be beyond routines or habits.
Maps are not about shapes but about energies flowing in and out of places. They are about directions and obstacles. The circulation of the blood. The blood of cities. The blood of a Territory. All this akin to the mind’s instability. Etel Adnan
Wandering in language & wandering in space
CUES Books In his lyrical book, the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote about nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, cellar. Oasis designed based on these cues for enabling its user for the create intimate connection and deeper understanding of himself or herself.
FORMAT Maps The format of this design based on maps. Finding our favorite places helps us to understand ourselves because there is a lot of layers to analyse in the space: sound, smell, texture, patterns, memories, familiarity, connections or associations, similarities and differences. Looking and reflecting these layers of space and our mind a way of understanding ourselves deeply. Oasis speaks about the relationship between time and space through a non-linear language. To create a new relationship between the world inside and outside of the person Oasis includes cues from past and everyday encounters as well as future imaginations. Besides, this format creates a free field to dreaming, playing and exploring for the user. Oasis is going to be a well-folded journal with its introduction text. It will be ready at the unexpected locations for its user plus it will be mailed to users’ addresses if they order. All the poems, proses, photographs, sketches, maps, and diagrams are welcome because Oasis is designed to be an authentic, more intimate notebook for the encounter with space.
“Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... It only suggests where to look. A map provides no answers, nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music...�
FORMAT Corners Everyday we do a lot of things automatically. We think, judge and do automatically. What happens if we see them, and be able to think about it? It makes possible to see suggestion of movements, directions and connections. Every detail in Oasis part of your daily existence. Space, corners, sounds, colors, shapes, words, textures, internal or external observations, cycles, encounters and interactions. You need to be aware and awake because “mapping these invisible tendencies requires a scan-like registration.�
People are atmosphere builders. Even before they are born they have to relyon sharing inner worlds. That close contact of people with other people, and things generates in an interior, a micro spere a sensitive and informative spatial immune system. Peter Sloterdijk