WORKS: ARTISTIC / PUBLICATIONS & TALKS
Once I Set Foot Outside (A performative installation)
Once I Set Foot Outside is a performative installation co-created by Ayse Draz and Marlin de Haan, born out of their meeting during de Haan's artist residency in Istanbul in 2016/2017. The work departs from a simple but urgent question: what do people want from public space, and what do they remember of it?

Over 50 people across Turkey and Germany were interviewed through questionnaires, sharing their best and worst memories of public space, their desires, their fears. These personal images, words, and scenes were gathered and brought into the black box, used not as a stage but as a pedestal, a converter of memory, to invite audiences into fragmentary encounters, to let minds drift, and to generate new associations.

The piece sits at the intersection of performance, visual art, and installation. Audiences are not guided toward a single reading; they are invited to complete the work through their own viewpoints.

At the heart of the project is a political question, held lightly: where public space no longer serves its purpose, where people become their own censors out of fear or self-protection, what freedoms remain? And when material gathered in one context (Istanbul) is placed in another (Düsseldorf), what shared or universal ground emerges?

Premiered at Bomontiada Alt, Istanbul, June 2018, and FFT Düsseldorf, November 2018.

With Gizem Bilgen, Canan Yücel Pekiçten, Erkan Uyanıksoy Lights: Simon Möllendorf | Costume Design: Milen Nae Duration: 30 minutes

Funded by Kunststiftung NRW, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW, NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste. Co-produced with FFT Düsseldorf and A Corner in the World × Bomontiada ALT, Istanbul. Supported by Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation and SALT Galata.


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© AYŞE DRAZ, 2026