MAÇA | sub

MAÇA is a cultural exchange program developed by the sub initiative. It is rooted on solidarity, hospitality, and shared production between Mardin and Çanakkale. The program brings together women+ artists living in these two regions and aims to create spaces of encounter through multilingual exchange and collective practice.

Beginning in Mardin and extending toward Çanakkale, MAÇA is conceived as a program of hospitality and solidarity that strengthens the networks of women+ artists. Through shared production, digital exchange, and in-person encounters, it explores the potential of feminist approaches to reimagine the present.

At the heart of MAÇA lies the idea of hospitality: artists working within one another’s spaces, transforming their experiences through proximity, and rewriting both local context and personal memory through shared time and practice.

MAÇA focuses on the transformative power of feminist approaches in shaping contemporary cultural production. It proposes a plural space of making and learning where women+ come together through art, building bridges of solidarity between regions beyond centers.

Planned to take place between April and November 2026, the program will unfold through open calls, online gatherings, workshops, and public events, gradually forming a network between the two cities.

MAÇA took shape through the encounter and neighbourly relationship between its project coordinators, Zehra Tezdönen (Mardin) and İlayda Tunca (Çanakkale), which began in Mardin.

Shared spaces, time spent together, and practices of making side by side gradually deepened ideas of hospitality, care, and solidarity. These experiences now open toward a wider ground of collective production and mutual support extending between Mardin and Çanakkale.

Since 2017, sub has been operating as an independent art initiative based in Çanakkale. It explores the relationship between artistic production, it's social circulation, and collectivity. The initiative develops shared processes of making between artists, researchers, and local communities, and seeks to build horizontal, open, and care-based cultural structures.

sub is closely connected to forms of cultural production that emerge beyond major centers. It is interested in how art develops off-center and how relationships with rural, migrant, or local communities transform cultural production. For the initiative, being outside the center is not only a spatial condition but also a different way of organizing and expressing. From this position, sub develops slow and relational production models grounded in community-based learning, creating safe and inclusive spaces where different experiences can meet.

Emerging from this approach, Seeing the Mountain (Dağı Görmek)—which began in 2024—is a long-term project shaped through a site-sensitive and slow production model. Through mapping workshops, long walks in the Kazdağları, and relationships built with local actors, the project seeks to develop a layered understanding of the mountain. It invites participants into a sensory and collective thinking process while opening space for artistic practices grounded in local knowledge and an ethics of care.

As a continuation of these process-based practices, MAÇA, planned for 2026, focuses on the transformative potential of feminist strategies in contemporary cultural production. It proposes a plural, relational, and center-peripheral space for learning and making, and aims to create a network where women+ artists build solidarity through art while forming new connections between regions beyond cultural centers. Developed between Mardin and Çanakkale, the program brings together women+ artists from both regions through hospitality, solidarity, and shared production.