As We Used to Spell

As words extend faster and further into public and personal spaces than ever before, they reclaim their agency in real time, as spells. The operative power of phrases, prompts, and protests over our lives is at the center of the project, which explores how emergent and residual spell practices act through embodied and spatial forms.

The project takes Barın Han as its point of departure, a modernist building in Çemberlitaş/ Istanbul that housed the printing and bookbinding workshop of Emin Barın, a renowned Turkish artist and calligrapher with ties to the historic Bauhaus and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. In this context, As We Used to Spell offers a critical reflection on modernist “truths”, those spells of techno-rationalism that continue to shape the way we think, speak, and build. Through a critical rereading of Ernst Neufert's "lnum" 1; "Selbsteinreden" (auto-suggestions), it investigates how these “truths-for” (Sylvia Wynter) are continuously spatialized through bodily and machinic reproductions and militaric repetitions. Their loops sustain a logic of patriarchal capitalist extraction and, at the same time, provoke transformations and errors.

As We Used to Spell seeks emancipatory and transformative spell practices that question systems of domination while invoking everyday lore, generosity, and humor. The first part of this ongoing research project was conceived by Aslı Serbest and Mona Mahall, together with Emma Waltraud Howes. A accompanying roundtable included Banu Cennetoğlu, Begüm Özden Fırat, Merve Elveren, Mona Mahall, Meriç Öner, Aslı Serbest.

• Ernst Neufert (1900–1986) was a member of the Bauhaus school. His private notes (“Selbsteinreden”) for his final book, titled: Lebensgestaltungslehre (Life Design Manual) were intended to optimize not only the built environment, but life itself. At first, these notes read like a rational manual, but they then turn into autosuggestive spells: a mixture of a self-disciplining program, authoritarian military rhetoric, and an early management handbook that become obsessive repetitions. The artists read the notes in a single take, accepting every reading and spelling error, thereby exposing the compulsive logic of Neufert’s self-suggestions.

Neufert is best known for his work on the standardization of architectural design and the construction industry, particularly through his widely used reference book Architects’ Data (1936). This book has been described as a proto-algorithmic approach to the production of space. In 1938, Neufert was hired by Albert Speer, then Adolf Hitler’s General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, to oversee the rationalization and standardization of the German building industry. In 1944, Neufert’s efforts were redirected to planning the post-war reconstruction of Germany’s bombed cities. After the Second World War, Neufert’s career remained unaffected by the denazification process; he secured a professorship at the Technical University of Darmstadt and opened his own office.

Series of typographic posters, speaker, artificial hair, sound, underwear, historical photographs'
Barın Han, Istanbul, 2025/2026

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