sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

REMEMBER WHAT YOU CANNOT FORGET!: “MEMORY OF A SQUARE
(PERCEIVED FROM AN INTERIOR)”
Defne TÜZÜN *
Gülsün Karamustafa’s double projection video installation, Memory of a Square (2005) 1 ,
juxtaposes two narratives, which are linked in parallel. One narrative line, which is comprised of
archival footage, reveals the memory of Taksim Square by depicting the political and social events of
contemporary Turkey spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. This real footage, marked by military
interventions, and First of May incidents, shows demonstrations and protests taking place in Taksim,
as well as glorifications of the Atatürk monument in the square.
The other narrative line displays moments from the life of a fictive family in their home interiors.
The subtitle of the video—“perceived from an interior”—implies that this apartment is located near
the square and its residents could watch the events happening outside. In the flat, a family of three
generations resides: presumably a grandmother, two daughters and a grandson. The husband, again
presumably, of the younger sister, is seen in few instances. In the absence of the husband/father, the
women practice their routine activities like preparing dinner or sewing. The time in the interiors is
always filled with waiting, worrying and sadness.
For this video installation, Karamustafa edits the images of a real, public space and those of an
imaginary, domestic space together. The artist screens some portion of this edited material on one
projection, and the rest on the other. In this two channel video installation, different moments of
interiors and exteriors are juxtaposed in such a way that in the adjacent screens, no two interiors (or
exteriors) are shown at the same moment. When one screen shows the interior space, which is
coded as imaginary and domestic, the other screen invariably shows the exterior space, which is
coded as real and public.
In other words, both screens show interiors and exteriors but not at the same moment, when one
reveals the interiors, the other shows the exteriors. The spectators, simultaneously looking at the two
screens, are compelled to bridge what is happening in the interiors and exteriors, thereby, they are
invited and even forced to construct a dialogue between the two happenings. While engaging in such
a dialogue, the viewers inescapably fill the gaps from their own recollection of their individual pasts
and of Turkey’s recent history.
In this paper, I intend to show the ways in which Karamustafa’s work demonstrates the
inextricably interwoven relationship between interiority and exteriority as this relationship concerns
space, memory and subjectivity. We can perhaps shed a better light on this paradoxical relation of
the interiority and the exteriority evoked in Karamustafa’s work with the help of Jacque Lacan’s
notion of extimité: “Lacan coins the term extimité by applying the prefix ex (from exterieur, ‘exterior’)
to the French word intimité (‘intimacy’).” 2 Lacan uses this term to problematize the complex relation
between exterior and intimate, and to emphasize that the other (or otherness) appears as an
unassimilable element even as it is at the very core of the subject’s psychic apparatus. Lacan’s
extimité foremost challenges the idea that the subject is a form of interiority.
In his seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan posits the term, extimité, to explicate the
structural place of das Ding, or the Thing. For Lacan, the Thing is foremost a primordial otherness, an
alterity constitutive of one’s very being and of the symbolic system, yet an unassimilable element
that does not lend itself to signification, which cannot be symbolized, nor can it be integrated into
the symbolic order. In this regard, the Thing is foremost an internal, structural necessity, the
*
Kadir Has University, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema.