İlayda Çetinkaya
Born in 1996 in Mersin, I studied ballet, theater and music. I played basketball professionally. When I was in high school, I went to Denmark with the student exchange program organized in cooperation with the European Union. Then I graduated early from Istanbul Okan University with a degree in International Relations, Politics. While studying, I wanted to develop my interests by taking courses from other faculties. I have also attended certificate programs on politics, marketing, communication, refugee issues, blogging. After my graduation, I studied Basic Art History. After gaining work experience in different fields, I worked as a content producer and coordinator at Ideflow Social media platform for a long time. I am currently doing my Master's degree at Bilgi University. I am currently writing poetry and studying drumming. The blog address where I share my poems: ilaydacetinkaya.blogspot.com
Do Not Enter, Private Property
City limits, parking lots, buildings with 4 walls... These borders that we encounter every day are part of the flow of our lives. In the light of while I can see, that individuals have physical and emotional borders we may find it difficult to recognize. Yet these boundaries, which we may not realize, can help us determine our personality, our pursuits, where we want to stop or how we want to continue.
We need to protect or build these invisible boundaries in order to be ourselves, to build healthy, self-aware relationships, to remember and not lose the real me. Boundaries that are not protected physically and emotionally from an early age, or that have been eroded and damaged by others, can lead to emotional manipulation of people in later periods, to the inability to make decisions on one's own and to feeling insecure about the decisions to be made, to seeing oneself as someone who is not oneself in other mirrors, and to one's voice being left behind compared to other voices in one's life. The person who realizes that he or she has overstepped his or her boundaries in physical and emotional areas should also be able to realize that the decisions he or she has made in the past are not his or her own. Boundary transgressions, ranging from the fact that he or she did not decide physically to be where he or she is, to the fact that the situations he or she chooses emotionally do not belong to him or her, can be corrected by recognizing these transgressions. In order to get to know oneself, to decide what is good for one's self, what one wants to do, to make space for oneself, to choose one's direction, to avoid being manipulated, one either begins to rebuild one's stretched and dulled boundaries or to draw the boundaries one has never been able to create. Assoc. Prof. Dr. İ. Volkan Gülüm talks about the importance of saying "no", which is one of the most important things to be considered for the process of creating boundaries in his book Healing Boundaries, in this context, those who want to create boundaries for themselves both emotionally and physically need to consciously create and then maintain those boundaries. Changes that occur in the process of creating the boundary that is not there or in the process of rebuilding the boundaries that have become unclear, cutting the psychological umbilical cord with one's old habits, destroying what was not one's own in the previous period, thinking about and confronting issues that are good or not good for oneself, changes in the physical environment, emotional repair stages can lead to a painful process that is not easy. In this time of chaos and uncertainty, as the changes in the rebuilding process signal one's own essence, one can realize that this process is long but worth enduring. As a result, people who realize that their boundaries have been overstepped and want to repair these boundaries can make their lives more free and belong to them by listening to themselves, getting to know themselves, acting in line with their own choices, creating boundaries that define them in the best way, and determining their own places in the emotional and physical context. In the context of this issue, the exhibition touches upon our borders that are crossed, both emotionally and physically, and the chaos and loss that results from crossing them, while also touching upon the process of establishing the border and the difficulties that may arise along the way, ultimately revealing the fundamental question we need to ask ourselves.