Single Channel Video, 2011
Dismantling an image from the political history of Turkey. Past/Forward takes a video footage which is shared with public with 20 years delay, and discusses visibility, representation and death of an image.
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Background Info – Leyla Zana’s oath:
The first kurdish woman who was elected to the turkish parliament. She made a speech and gave her oath to the country in the parliament in her first day
– as a regular procedure – in 1991. During her oath she wore a kurdish flag badge and a head band in the same colors. The parliament members started banging
the tables and shouted at her to obstruct her speech. She finished her oath in turkish, turned to the parliament members and said this in kurdish:
‘this oath is for the brotherhood of kurdish and turkish people’. It was forbidden to speak kurdish in public places in turkey then, and wearing kurdish flag was
taken as an attack to the country and as a sympathy towards the kurdish guerilla movement, PKK. When her party was closed down and she was stripped of
her diplomatic immunity, she got arrested and imprisoned for charges of separatism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQaiowrL-VQ
Thought Process
I have been busy finding out and reading about the political events that took place in the 90s in turkey, when I was in my teens.
I’m fascinated to reconstruct the things I have a memory of in one way or other. I did not start doing this to make videos, but out of personal interest, to see where i end up.
I have done one video about a special unit members’ talk about the operations he did in that period of around 10 years(Anti-Stockholm Syndrome video),
Past/Forward is the second video, and I may say that I see it going towards a series of ‘short history of political atmosphere in 90?s turkey’.
This whole issues is quite loaded. It almost gives me the feeling that I have to tiptoe around the issue. How to deal with it, is the big question in front of me.
Process
I have taken the video footage of Leyla Zana’s oath in the parliament, and had a dismantling process on it, rather than a destroying one.
I then picked up only the moments that foto’s of the event were taken. These are the moments that were captured and put on newspapers.
(In 1991, the video footage was not in circulation, and also not for a long time after that.). Also no external audio is added to the video, the audio track is intact.
I cut the parts where there is a flash by a photo camera and I expanded those moments till the next ‘flash moment’ comes, so some are much slower than the others.
POINTS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT
Several points of discussion, that arose from this point on;
*visible/invisible, visibility&representation. The discussion is about a group of people who are absent in the parliament at that point.
*deleuze&guattari – a thousand plateaus // dismantling the face/organs=defragmenting the audiovisual? Can I interpret it that way?
*roland barthes-camera lucida // the moment you take a picture is the moment you don’t see, it is the moment that does not exist for you,
it is a dead moment, photography=death. (this is not a direct quote, I just remember reading something similar in this book)
*Photos are the visibility of an event, what is on a photo is the representation of that specific event, the visible part of the event, the memory, the reference point…
they are the ones(when with the flash) that disrupts the image and the capture of that specific moment by the eye or video.
*’..If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine.
Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity…”
(this quote is a very loose association, I don’t take the face literally, nor others, it is inspiring and somehow connected. the parliament as the face.
Face is a communication tool, it is part of a system or a structure, if I take parliament as a face, what would happen?
Is the case of Leyla Zana then a disfunction of that structure, what may the dismantling that part helps to gain?)
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