Supported by IASPIS, Consulate General of Sweden and Kadıköy Municipality.

Dansbana! Kalamis creates a place for dancing in the city. Developed in dialogue with the Kadıköy Municipality and local dancers, the design is inspired by the underwater world and the geological richness of the area, located on the bank of the Bosphorus. The intervention is a dance platform equipped with bluetooth speakers, allowing anyone to dance to their own music, morning till evening, every day. Dansbana! Kalamis is a permanent installation in the park, with the aim to create a new meeting spot in Istanbul for dancers of all kinds.

Statistics show that many public spaces for outdoor activities, such as football fields or skateboard ramps, are primarily used by boys. Girls are heavily underrepresented as users of public spaces, and Dansbana! was created with a desire to change that through dance. The design of a shell as background for the dancers evokes the famous Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, a subordinate depiction of women, to propose instead an active, empowering representation.

Dansbana! (Sweden) is an organisation based in Stockholm, Sweden, designing public spaces for dance. It was founded and is run by the architects Anna Fridolin, Anna Pang and Teres Selberg. The name ‘dansbana’ derives from a traditional building type for outdoor dancing common in Scandinavia. The organisation seeks to revive and update this typology and make space for many types of dancers and dances. Dansbana! tries in particular to reach out to girls as users of outdoor spaces and involve them in the design process. Local dancers are also always involved in the process, to create a community around the sites and to ensure that over time they become meeting places in the city for many people, from locals to professional dancers.