Melih Gencboyaci

Melih Gencboyaci, was born 1977 in Germany. While studying economics and acting in Turkey. Later, he studied at Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Mime departement in The Netherlands. Since 2008, he has been an active member of fruitful and tender collaborations: Schwalbe and Copycats. He was one of the co-founders and engaged in developing strategies for the positioning of collective Schwalbe. He designed a special action plan for the production Schwalbe is looking for crowd. With this production they worked with participants from Germany, Turkey, Netherlands and Belgium. The final XL version took place in Amsterdam. Link.

In 2012, he initiatie a collaboration between Rotterdam and Istanbul performing arts field. As an outcome, collectieve Copycat founded with whom he worked in different projects. In 2017, he took distance from the performing arts field to consider his position and become Hatha Yoga teacher.

Currently, Melih is at Das Theatre extended curation program and he focuses on embodied resistance, which occupies a central place within the diversity of the transdisciplinary field of his research. In this context, embodied resistance, underscores what it means to be human in the quick transforming world and attempts to bridge the gap between fields such as art, politics and spirituality with the following questions: How can a political understanding of body be instrumental in proposing a new identification? How can we through physical awareness and rituals politicize the body? How can a curatorial practice provide space and time and go beyond displaying problems towards agency and engagement? Addressing this questions opens up a a new dimension about how the body can be a site of everyday resistance and how ‘The Embassy of Future Citizenship’, as a performative curatorial practice, can have a potential to embody that ideology. #alternative-citizenship #process #artpolicy #invisible-immigration #re-identification