With the equipment obtained during its preparation phase and the planning that went with it, Keter Studio began a new project called “Lilik” in 2025.
Keter Studio has been awarded artistic production support from CultureCIVIC for the “Lilik Project”. The CultureCIVIC Culture and Art Support Programme is funded by the European Union. This support enables us to further develop the project’s research and production process around local contexts, cultural knowledge, and collective modes of making.
Concerned with the language, oral narrative and cultural practices that are on the verge of disappearing in Hemşin, the project’s first part sets out to record the stories that still exist and to make their cultural value legible, collecting the region’s oral creature stories through meetings and interviews with local people, and transforming those narratives into large-scale three-dimensional sculptural installations.
In its second part, these sculptures, sited in culturally and ecologically strategic locations, aim to bring interaction and activity to the town, through a choice of materials and a land-art approach that integrate with nature and the local fabric, and through the events and gatherings organised around each installation.
In the project’s third part, meetings and workshops held with local people, and with children in particular, will lead to the design of a narrative and a mythological character reflecting the changing fabric and culture of the town and addressing its physical and spiritual needs in this period; this creature, formed collectively with the community, will be modelled and made into a story, then three-dimensionally printed at landscape scale and installed in the town as a sculpture. Around that installation, further gatherings and new cultural practices that might enrich town life will be devised, working to make local oral narrative and ritual dynamic and sustainable.
Having begun its three-dimensional sculpture trials, interviews and collection work, the studio aims to complete the sculptures and carry out the installations and events during 2026. Having obtained a 3D printer and the post-printing shaping, finishing and painting tools for the first part of the project, the studio needs financial support for the second and third parts.
The word “Lilik” means toy in the Hemşin language. It reflects the themes of idling and playing that sit within Keter Studio’s conceptual approach, and the condition of the creature sculptures as games and toys, a means of interaction that brings a community together.
Project aims: to contribute to safeguarding cultural heritage by recording Hemşin’s endangered oral narratives and local cultural values; to support connection with the past and the strengthening of collective memory through public installations and community gatherings; to bring vitality to the region’s social and cultural life through narratives developed collectively with children and local people, and through new cultural approaches; and to establish new relationships between local culture and the natural environment by integrating the principles of ecology and sustainability into the project via nature-compatible materials and a land-art approach.
Carried out in collaboration with Hemşin Yaşam Derneği, the project aims to revive cultural memory, and to develop community interaction and new practices through public art that is in keeping with nature. The project’s first part (the meetings, interviews and modelling) is nearing completion.
Creature stories are taken up here, in a project centred on cultural memory and oral narrative, because they are more accessible by nature (compelling, memorable, and hospitable to expression) and because in Hemşin culture they symbolically work through communal memory, natural cycles, fragility and fear, social order and ethical values. Becoming an active cultural dialogue through public installations and ritual gatherings, these liminal beings carry a potential for social transformation in their narratives: at the threshold, emerging in periods of transition, giving form to the tension between order and chaos.
Among the creatures that emerged from the collection work, Cazi and Ubur stand as cultural expressions of social experience and trauma along the axes of gender, morality and death; Hipilik and Karakoncolos can be connected to current local concerns through the way they give form to fears bound up with nature, season and ecological uncertainty. Local fantastical narrative is, moreover, fertile ground for creating original designs capable of informing contemporary art and visual culture.
The sculptures designed for the project will be treated not as visual representations alone, but as integrated installations in which the cultural meanings these mythological figures carry are projected into place, material, function and interaction with the community. Each creature’s design is conceived to correspond directly with its role in local narrative and its symbolic function: the materials chosen will be in keeping with traditional modes of making and with the region’s ecological conditions, while the choice of form and site will bring alive the spatial and seasonal contexts of the figures’ stories.
The sculptures will be designed not as objects to be looked at but as living works of public art: usable, touchable, able to be sown with seed, able to give shade, able to become places of remembrance and of sharing. They will therefore be semi-temporary structures that integrate with nature through a land-art approach, with only their armature or certain parts 3D-printed, completed with recycled and local materials.
The sites and forms of the installations will be chosen so as to make visible the figures’ social roles in the mythology and their historical contexts: Karakoncolos, associated with scarcity, will have his basket-woven body filled with soil and turned into a bearer of abundance suitable for growing vegetables, while Cazi, bound up with women’s labour, will function as a place of rest and meeting. Each figure will thus enter into dialogue with the present-day community through the values and symbolic meanings its own story carries, becoming a living public space for seasonal rituals and gatherings.
First draft ideas for the installations have been developed from the mythological motifs that came to the fore in the collection work.
Cazi: Gender Roles and the Mythic Reflection of Traumatic Experience. Cazi is a female figure in Hemşin: ugly, sharp-nosed, devil-guised, carrying a broom, who does not love children and who kills them. This figure’s emergence is bound up with the gendered division of labour in the region, and tied tightly to a socioeconomic structure shaped by outward migration. Men left the town to work in cities or abroad as long-term migrant labourers, and the burden of production and care fell almost entirely to women. The cazi myth developed as a cultural narrative for coping with the traumatic losses of mothers who had to keep working through childbirth and who, falling asleep from exhaustion while nursing, smothered their babies. In this context the phrases “the caz took it” or “Cazi carried the child off” are a personified account of social and emotional burden, of guilt and of mourning. Read through a feminist lens, cazi is a historical figure shaped by the invisibility and the overloading of women’s labour.
Ubur: Moral Order and the Image of the Afterlife. Ubur is told in Hemşin as the soul of a person who did evil while alive, whom the earth will not accept, returning to the body and rising from the grave. The belief carries the idea of punishment after death and of moral justice into local mythology. That Ubur is punished by “having fire placed under his feet” and can only be sent back with a particular prayer (“Urum eline”) reflects an effort to bound supernatural fear within a religious and moral frame. This figure takes its place in collective memory as a liminal being symbolising the passage between death and life; it is a symbolic instrument for the community’s exclusion and disciplining of evil.
Karakoncolos: Scarcity, the Winter Cycle and the Spirits of Threshold Periods. Karakoncolos is a genderless figure in Hemşin: hairy, hunched, crooked, carrying a toothed comb, haunting the gardens in winter. Told to stop children damaging the crops in times of scarcity, this myth functioned as a mechanism for protecting the values of a subsistence-farming economy. That he can be pacified with answers containing the word “kara” (black) shows how seasonal fears in cultural memory are balanced with humour. Appearing in the winter months (December–January) and haunting food stores and granaries, the figure is a folkloric expression both of the anxiety of scarcity and hunger and of winter’s dangerous period of transition. Traits such as his fear of fire and his being chased off with a chain can be read as part of seasonal transition rituals.
Hipilik: A Widespread Mythic Expression of Bodily Fragility. Hipilik is described in Hemşin folklore as the night-hag: a small, thin-voiced being that sits on a sleeper’s chest and stops their breath. In folk belief this figure is an instance of physiological experience, sleep paralysis, turned into mythic narrative. Culturally, it gives form to fears about the individual’s fragility at night and in sleep; it personifies forces that are unseen and cannot be controlled. In folkloric accounts Hipilik’s “little man” form represents the intrusion of fragile and unpredictable forces into everyday human life.
