Collective Disco: The Rhythm of Solidarity
Reclaiming the Commons Through Protest and Dance

How can protest, through dance and collective movement, open up a space for all beyond time and place?
Collective Disco is a spatial and research-based project, that explores the liberating potential of dance in reclaiming both time and public space through protest. The study emerges as a continuation of previous research, Dialogue Hub (Türkoğlu, E. U., 2021), a thesis focused on the spatial pedagogies of protest. Drawing from its methodology and findings, Collective Disco blends personal experience, archival memory, and embodied movement practices to investigate how contemporary protests redefine public space as transnational spaces, beyond fixed notions of time and place.

In 2024 alone, ACLED recorded over 143,000 protest events globally encompassing everything from small demonstrations to large national movements highlighting a global trend of intensified collective action. Collective disco responds to this momentum by framing “protest” as an embodied practice and it reveals how these embodied acts foster emotional bonds, cultivate solidarity, and create spaces of collective care. Here, protest becomes a living pedagogy: a collective choreography of presence, and an act of reclaiming the commons.

The research forges a bridge between ancestral practices of dance and contemporary protest gatherings, carrying forward rhythms of resistance and the project developed as a mix of editorial study, video production and sound design which will be experienced in a spatial installation. It builds on the inclusive, open-ended strategy of Dialogue Hub (Türkoğlu, E. U., 2021): a mobile, participatory platform centering dialogue, gathering, and mutual learning. Collective Disco transforms into a rhythm based archive blending documentary footage, soundscapes, and protest choreographies from Istanbul, Milan, and beyond.

Through this layered choreography of media, voices, and bodies, the project evokes a nonlinear temporality: a cyclical, pulsing force that moves between memory and momentum. It proposes a new way of experiencing time through dance, protest, and collective rhythm, it shifts away from quantitative time and moves into a “bodily now” .

The research is rooted in transdisciplinary collaboration. Through ongoing conversations, interviews, and shared reflections with contributors from feminist movements (8 Mart Feminist Gece Yürüyüşü), architectural collectives (Herkes İçin Mimarlık), and public dance communities (Swing Istanbul), the work has evolved as a collective process. These moments of collaboration have shaped both the conceptual and emotional foundation of the project, allowing it to emerge as a constellation of voices in motion.

The installation of Collective Disco is structured around three core elements: a space to dance, a space to dialogue, and a space to share. It proposes a flexible, dynamic environment—a dispositif—activated by its participants. It invites people to reconnect with their bodies and with each other, through shared experiences of rhythm and movement. As a living archive and experiential platform, the project imagines design as a practice of presence—reshaping how we inhabit time and space together.