Designing
the Conditions
of Participation.

How can a gathering ask something of people before asking what they will receive?

A balance of giving and receiving.

In 2014 I returned to SUNDAZE as a season of fourteen Sundays.

Fourteen Sundays could not be approached as the same party repeated fourteen times. Each evening moved from one of our residents to a local DJ from another musical and social circle, then to an international artist. It was a way of bringing different groups into the same situation before they knew one another.

Until then, every event I had made had a ticket. For SUNDAZE I wanted to remove money from the entrance, but the question was not how to make participation free. A situation can only work when the different sides inside it can give and receive in a workable balance. The artist, venue, bar, sound, production, travel and labour were already part of that relation. The person arriving could not remain outside it.

Registration was one answer. It was not meant to make SUNDAZE exclusive: it made the decision to come more deliberate, and it allowed us to prepare.

But registration was still mostly an exchange of information. I was looking for the condition through which the person arriving would also enter this relation: not necessarily through money, but through a real movement towards the situation. It needed to be accessible, not measured by price, and chosen and carried by the person arriving.

Fruit was already inside the 2014 planning before it became the entrance condition. It sat among the fabrics, flags, hammocks and baskets that could make a venue feel like SUNDAZE. It was part of the material environment, not yet a condition of entry.

Then it appears in writing as the entrance condition:

Register. Bring fruit. The variety and quantity do not matter. Put it in our basket when you arrive.

When the season opened, the public message was direct:

Entry is not with money, but with fruit. Please buy it from a local shopkeeper. This is important.

The instruction connected the entrance to another part of the city. A participant chose the fruit before arriving and bought it from a neighbourhood shop. They carried it across the city and placed it in the shared basket at the door. Access, participation and a local economic relation were joined through this sequence.

This is why I count 2014 as the beginning. By then, the name, time of day, sound, programme, communication, registration and fruit were no longer separate ideas around a Sunday event. They had begun to work as related conditions.

Why fruit?

Fruit has been part of the relation between living beings and nature from the beginning. It grows in different forms across different geographies and seasons. Much of it can be eaten without cooking or first being turned into another product. Human beings and other animals recognise and consume it. Before it became part of an entrance condition, fruit already belonged to daily life.

Every culture has its own relation to fruit, but choosing it, carrying it and sharing it can be understood without a common language. Music and dance were already ways of being together without having to explain everything first. With fruit there was another action we could recognise: bringing something and placing it between others.

My own relation to fruit was not abstract. Since I was a child, when we went to visit somebody, we did not arrive empty-handed. We carried bags of fruit into the house. The fruit was opened, washed, cut and placed between people. We ate it while sitting and talking. Bringing fruit was part of how a visit began.

SUNDAZE did not take place in our homes, but I was interested in what could happen when a person approached a gathering through this familiar movement. They did not arrive only to receive a programme already prepared for them. They arrived with something they had chosen. Their relation with the gathering began before the music and before the door.

The instruction to buy from a local shopkeeper was part of this route. The fruit connected the neighbourhood shop, the person carrying it, the journey across the city, the entrance and the table inside. By the time somebody arrived at SUNDAZE, they had already thought about what to bring, found it, carried it and given time and attention to the situation.

This is also why the instruction left variety and quantity open. One apple and one watermelon did not have the same market value, and they did not need to. Fruit was not another currency. What we could recognise at the door was the act: a person had chosen something, carried it and brought it into the relation. The condition made the person arriving part of the balance of giving and receiving without turning that movement into a price.

At the door, fruits arriving from separate journeys were gathered in one place. We washed, cut and shared them during the event. When there was enough left, it continued to people living on the street through the distribution we organised. A fruit chosen by one person could be eaten by another, and part of what entered the gathering could continue outside it afterwards.

What started in 2014 later became Entrance with Fruit. Its logic was not that fruit had replaced money as a softer ticket. Fruit connected nature, season, the neighbourhood shop, the person carrying it, the shared table and the people around it. It gave the entrance condition a material form that everybody could recognise without having to value it in the same way.

During the measured 2017-18 period, the archive records 7,300 kilograms gathered and shared. Some was eaten together during SUNDAZE; much of it continued its route after the event.

What makes the situation

What are we actually making when we make an event?

For me, an event is a situation. We meet inside situations. And every situation is made by many conditions touching one another: the hour, season, weather, light, wind, heat, architecture, distance, the ground under our feet, water nearby or underneath us, music, artists, sound, food, drinks, service, labour and, of course, the people who arrive.

Before the situation becomes live, the venue, sound system, bar, boat or garden, fruit, services and people are separate parts. The situation is produced by the relations between them.

My work is to see and design those relationships before they become live.

For years I described Gigology’s role in a similar way: bringing the different sides together. But bringing people and things together does not mean placing their names in the same programme. Each side arrives with its own knowledge, responsibility and condition, and each one changes the possibilities of the others. My work is to understand these conditions and create a relation in which they can work.

The artist needs a condition in which a performance can happen. The bartender needs knowledge, preparation, ice, the right station and enough space to work. The sound technician, cook, driver, security team, boat owner, cleaner and guest each arrive with another responsibility. None of them makes the whole situation alone. I do not make all their work either. I design the condition in which their work can meet.

This is visible in the archive long before I gave it this name. Downtown was constructed through day and night, two sides of Istanbul, streets, galleries, shops, a boat and a club. For Gece Yüzmeleri, the artist programme, communication, bar, operations and event management were not separate services attached after the idea; they were the means through which the idea could exist.

Small decisions enter this relationship too. In 2019, a discussion about a 50 cl bottle expanded into how long it would stay in a dancing person’s hand, how it would affect the movement of the body, when somebody would return to the bar, the price and the balance of the bar. This can sound like a tiny detail. It is not separate from the event. It is the event.

Co-presence and social economy

When I say co-presence, I do not mean only that a crowd is standing in the same place. I mean the relations that become active because different people, knowledge, materials and responsibilities are present at the same time.

The ice has to be produced, delivered and stored before it reaches the bartender. The security team has to eat; perhaps we order pizza from a nearby restaurant. The card terminal comes from another company and needs rolls of paper produced somewhere else. Artists, drivers, technicians, cleaners, venue workers, local shops and participants enter the same situation from different directions. A person may come only to spend a few hours with friends, but that time also becomes part of this network.

This is what I mean by social economy here. Money moves through it, but so do work, time, knowledge, food, materials, energy, attention and responsibility. These are not secondary details behind an event. The event is produced through their relations.

This does not mean that every side automatically becomes equal. It means the work has to search for a balance in which each side can do its part without making the condition impossible for the others.

A practice built through repetition.

Entrance with Fruit is one form inside the wider SUNDAZE practice. It does not define every gathering.

This text was reconstructed from Harun Elibolca’s contemporaneous Gigology and SUNDAZE correspondence, historical project decks, public event material and present-day founder recollection. Plans and completed events are treated separately; private correspondence is paraphrased unless a line was already public or specifically approved for quotation.