TUZLU SU SALTWATER

LIV
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Giriş / Introduction
LV
Among the other international artists to address this ‘knot’, Francis Alÿs presents a
new film and installation titled The Silence of Ani. This project developed after a research
trip to Eastern Anatolia and is based on the recording of a number of children of
the region playing a variety of ‘bird calls’, little flute-like instruments that mimic the calls
of various species of birds. In the ruins of Ani near the Armenian border, once a roaring
city where children now play amongst the rubble, each child makes a different kind
of bird call that together become a monodic collective call for the return of the birds.
Also inspired by a journey to Eastern Anatolia and Ani is the new two-channel video
installation Such prophecies we write on banana skins created by German artist Kristina
Buch. During her research trip in those regions, she visited several Armenian
churches, including Saint Sarkis, destroyed and abandoned a century ago, overtaken
today by flourishing flowers and butterflies, suggesting forms of regeneration and the
futility of human violence. The work presents two photo-realistically animated, almost
identical yet diametri cally opposed visions of explosions, one of a key landmark of human
culture – a museum – the other of a landmark of nature – a mountain. Copying the
general framing, setting and rhythm of the final explosion sequence in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970), the images of explosions of nature and culture,
of human civilisation and the environment, slowly merge in a cloud of floating dust particles.
Antonioni employed a form of abstract realism to portray the alienation of man in
the mod ern world. Buch’s project, which reflects on our destructive impulses, and on
the wasteful heroic gesture, expands and transcends Antonioni’s scene. In her project,
we witness the complete disintegration of two of the monumental safe havens of our
human thinking and being: a dissolution of monuments of nature and culture, their definitions,
structures and symbols. The photorealistic quality of the digital images opens
the work up to a critique of the virtual realities that we increasingly face through media
and technology. The digital can be viewed as imploding into its own void.
The Turkish saying, ‘The flesh is yours, the bones are ours’ – meaning that a teacher
is granted influence over the learner by the student’s family – provides the source for
the title of a new project by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz that bears strong
connections to the Armenian history of Istanbul. In the 1870s, fires throughout the city
destroyed many of the traditional wooden houses, inaugurating a new era of stone
structures. Architect Raimondo D’Aronco was largely responsible for introducing
Art Nouveau to the city in the early twentieth century after the earthquake of 1894.
Rakowitz states, ‘Istanbul’s Art Nouveau buildings rose at a time when its Armenian
population was about to fall as a result of the ethnic cleansing. A member of this community,
the artisan Garabet Cezayirliyan, was responsible for crafting the mouldings
and friezes installed on the facades of these edifices, many of which remain visible
today.’ These plaster decorations and architectural flourishes found on the ‘skin’ of
Istanbul’s buildings bear the traces of Armenian fingers and hands, silent witnesses to
the traumatic histories of the city’s Armenian population which decreased throughout
the 1910s and 1920s to the tiny community it is today. As part of his project, Rakowitz
used an ancient tradition of mixing ground bones in his plaster, including bones from
dogs who may have died on Sivriada, and reflected on the contradictions, paradoxes
and violence of society, even while celebrating craft and communities of artisans.
(Figure) Jacques Lacan, lecture notes for seminar, 1979 (http://www.ecole-lacanienne.net/fr/p/lacan/m
nouvelles/paris-7/stenotypies-version-non-j-l-seminaire-xxvi-la-topologie-et-le-temps-1978-1979-98)