Sunday, 9 September 2007 | Levent OZLER
Barbarians' Banquet Design Exhibition
 BARBAR are a group of independent designers who have joined in a cooperative initiative to organize a design exhibition entitled, Barbarlar Sofrası - Barbarians' Banquet. The subject of this exhibit comprises a collective effort by this group of important Turkish designers to create unique design objects using the Rapid Manufacturing technologies. These designers include Erdem Akan, Oya Akman, Murad Babadağ, Alper Böler, Ela Cindoruk, Hakan Gencol, Yankı Göktepe, Gamze Güven, Sedef Haydaroğlu, Gökhan Karakuş, Defne Koz, Eray Makal, Erkmen Savaşkan, Adnan Serbest, Kunter Şekercioğlu, Taner Şekercioğlu and Ömer Ünal. As a group they represent a cross-section of Istanbul's active design community that has recently begun to create important design products with unique local qualities utilizing universal techniques.
For this exhibition, the designers in the initiative have over the past year outlined a number of objectives based on the application of the concept of the Barbarlar Sofrası - Barbarians' Banquet to the technological possibilities provided by Rapid Manufacturing. Through a series of salon style open discussion platforms, the designers have used the concept of the barbarian, in understanding the qualities that have made cultural production from Istanbul unique. The term barbarian which was used originally used by the Ancient Greeks to describe the peoples of the East and later adopted by the Romans into its modern usage to describe a person in a savage, primitive state, is used by the BARBAR group to poignantly provide a framework for what makes cultural production in Istanbul distinctive. As a geography on the front line between civilizations, Istanbul offers the opportunity to create culture that is the combination of many things at the same time as it is.
The designers of the BARBAR group focusing on a combination of environmental, social and mental realities existing in Istanbul's culture for thousands of years have explicitly applied these ideas to create objects for an ironically named Barbarians' Banquet. By using the leading edge capabilities of Rapid Manufacturing to physically create objects for a real banquet the designers of the Barbar Initiative have succeeded in producing a physical shape to a highly conceptual and sensitive term such as barbarian. The objects of the Banquet such as cups, trays, utensils, and votive symbols maximize the potential of Rapid Manufacturing to create physical manifestations of abstract object types and forms indicative of the unique melding of the very old and very new that could be called hyperarchaism.
Barbar: http://www.barbarlar.org/
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