My hands did not even tremble, he said. I gently lifted his hand, to my lips. He looked at me accustomed to having his hands kissed. I lifted his hand, the palm facing up both immediate and full of joy I bit his hand deliciously. His blood mixed with my saliva, and I could feel my chin getting wet. The bird entered the crack.
Mud and harvest speak to each other. Rooted. These roots give body to place. The sound of the body calms down the storm. The place is filled with states one after the other. This layeredness is not like a mountain unchangeable. It heaves, old repositories come up to the surface. The bird enters the crack and continues underground.
The dusk had turned steel blue. The morning was quick on its feet singing with the deep voice of an organ. The horse were watching people, teary. A mare relieved her hot piss on the stones. The men were unloading the meat. The wind tore through my clothes. What kind of a world was I living in? The bird entered the crack and continues to flap its wings under the earth.
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In speaking about the “spiritual crisis of white America” civil rights activist Ruby Sales articulated the question of “Where does it hurt?” as being a critical question to ask in public life today. This simple yet deeply important question shifted my methods, my media, my point of view in 2017—keeping artistic work at an arm’s distance is not an option today. The urgency of making work requires an entanglement that can only be launched with a radical introspection of where, how, and when that work happens and keeps happening.
My response to A Series of Un/Natural/ Disasters begins with the inability to begin to speak about landscapes. The landscape cradles human bodies, historicities, narratives, and temporalities. The landscape transcends physicality to create a home for language that describes and holds all directions, actions and reactions. “Landscape” contains the action of “scaping”, as “landmines” include “mining.” Building on the militaristic agencies claimed over the land through mining (through planting landmines and mining the earth for materials) I would like to draw on what I term the "actfulness" of “scaping” and “mining.” This "actful" way of making work would impose onto materials (syntaxes) what the landscape has undergone as social bodies contract, temporal bodies convulse.
A recent video work, From a Wandering Window, was grounded in the caption of a renovation photo that I happened upon while looking into the previous state of a mosque on my walking route in Kağıthane, Istanbul: “There were even bird nests inside” [emphasis mine] to describe a state of dilapidation made me imagine why birds would ever be linked with the state of an architectural building, triggering me to weave the non-narrative of the work, which is based on a window that leaves to meander and birds who choose not to see.
The found drone images used in the videos are stumblings. I settled into the /, embracing its semi-upright attempt to keep things together. I propose that we can articulate temporality in terms of the stumbling of time rather than through rupture as to remove the comprehension that can be debilitating in the context of artistic practice. Stumbling allows for a practice that does not confront the gaping immensity of ruptures, but instead integrates and delves into a temporality that can allow for overlaps and specificities that would otherwise not be available. This mode of practice would seek being-with-the-catastrophe rather than to heal or to revise the catastrophe.
I have been wondering whether sink holes and their beginning points, cracks, could be transliterations of an upheaval of the earth, temporarily made visible. And what would this articulation relay? Is it possible for us to pulsate and narrate with this upheaval?
The tool of the bird’s eye perspective has withdrawn from image-making practices—birds have chosen not to see and the earth is in upheaval. The images from such devices can only be stumbled on.
Could stumbling be claimed as a method of looking?
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CREDITS
All the footage used in the videos were found on Public Domain sources. The subtitling texts are inspired by a variety of sources, anchored and beginning in Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality (1936), which I accessed in Turkish in Suat Kemal Angı’s translation.
The video montage was done by my artist friend, Özgür Demirci. My production was supported by SAHA Studio, through their residency January–July 2021.
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