The final guest of the #inspiringwomen series, featuring women artists from the March program, is actor and director Esme Madra. We asked the artist, who has won critical acclaim for her performance in the play GEÇEN GÜN, about her sources of inspiration.

Sounds:

Every kind of water sound, the sound of fire burning in a wood stove, the sound of walking on gravel, people speaking in a language I don’t know, the sound of a trumpet, the sound of a classical guitar, the voice of a child singing, the sound of breaking glass. These sounds usually carry my mind away from where it is to somewhere else.

Books

Lewis Carrol – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Antoine de Saint-Exupery – The Little Prince, J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, the poems of Edip Cansever, the poems of Didem Madak, Isabelle Allende – The Sum of Our Days, Clarissa P. Estes – Women Who Run with the Wolves, Ursula K. Le Guin – The Dispossessed, Shakespeare – Hamlet, William Saroyan – The Human Comedy, Zabel Yesayan – The Last Cup, Zoya Pirzad – Things We Left Unsaid, İstasyon – Birgül Oğuz

Cities

Istanbul: My whole life has been spent here, and no matter how much it changes, you can always find a corner of your own, and strange things are bound to happen to you. And Guanajuato (Mexico): a city with wild parks, one that embraces you without smothering you.

Films

Fatih Akın’s Head-On, Milos Forman’s Hair, Miyazaki’s Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle, Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique… And from recent years, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun and Céline Sciamma’s Petit Maman.

Women:

The women who inspire me most are those closest to me, my friends: Ece Ekşi, Selen Hayal, Büşra Albayrak, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Gökçe Oğultekin, Birgül Oğuz, Basma Seiba, Merve Yazıcıoğlu. My grandmother Suzan Gülcügil, my mother Piyale Madra.

And among those I have never met: Clarissa P.Estes, Yıldız Tilbe, Isabelle Allende.