acousticspace

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Nation, national, and nationality are among the most problematic words in our vocabulary. Despite the fact they were merely inexistent until a couple of centuries ago, they have come to be perceived as permanent conditions of existence and categorizations of men. The emergence of each nationality, always coinciding with and supported by sibling constructions such as ethnic identities and racial formations and social technologies such as censuses, maps, and museums, is invariably a painful event, always at the expense of some. Whatever were the political, economic and cultural conditions that made them necessary, over time their advance caused a world of customs, rites, religious practices, dialects or even languages and their sum total, cultures to vanish, or rather brought inaptly together under one constructed yoke of nation, reducing culture down to an “idea of culture”—to put it in Nietzschean terms.

The exhibition we propose takes this invented and imagined nature of nationhood as its point of departure. Everyday, millions of people are promised unity under such tools as the flag, or the marked dates of a calendar (the monuments of collective memory or consciousness, as Walter Benjamin called them), or a map (which often cuts through people and geographies so forcefully that their absurdity are overshadowed by the wounds they open). To these we can add the news delivered to us by newspapers, TV and radio broadcasts from the four corners of the nation, which in most cases has nothing common other than the mere fact that they take place on the same day. And above all there is language, homogenized and formalized with the help of publishing press and its tyranny of “correct spelling.”

Our aim, with this prospective collection of works is to demonstrate the deep-seated absurdity that inhere in the concrete processes of nation-making as well as nation-keeping. We aim to bring together artists who utilize these very tools (and others) to play at the line between the truth and fiction of nation. Some of the artists we have thought for this collection are already treading on this line. Graeme Walker, a Brighton, UK based English artist has long been calling himself “a country”—among other things. Among his works are the recent foundation of a pebble museum in Brighton, establishment of a national park in Nieuwolda (Netherlands) and designing a national flag for Vlaggenmuseum in Rotterdam (Netherlands). Marton & Larré, a Romanian-Spanish duo based in New York and working predominantly with video and photography, have been igniting inconspicuous revolutions and forming micro-republics at the end of New York subway lines for numerous years. Their latest work on Far Rockaway portrays this remote New York neighborhood and its inhabitants ingeniously as an independent country. Hafriyat, a collective out of Istanbul, has attracted attention with their alternative election posters in Turkey last summer. Their redesigned ads, flags, logos, and posters mischievously and critically mimicked the bizarre visual language of the hegemonic neo-liberal nationalism in Turkey. Olgu Aytaç, a Turkish architect based in New York, who has been reading/writing/working on and with the theory of art and architecture, will contribute to this proposed collection by inventing a national architectural style. While our search for such artists is still in effect, we aim to commission works as well, such as instructional videos for invented folk dances, national anthems that aim to invoke no patriotic (or any) feeling in the listener or calendars marking trivial events. Once put together, we believe this collection will be a strong statement uttered in a minor-political, poetic tone.

*Sister Sivas, Brother Aintab picture (on which a Surplus Thought entry will follow soon) is by Nese Karamursel.

my most favorite project, which i never completed, was a gardening book for windowless cubicles, and it was titled as “the miracle of fluorescent light.” i had started working at an office, in one of those cubicles, couple years back and miracle was something i devised right upon my arrival to entertain myself. in time, however, it transformed into something else, becoming my most intimate way of being somewhere else, my favorite path of escape.

the “execution” of miracle consisted of several legs. first, the plants were begotten from a nearby, again fluorescent-clad, superstore. then, they were placed around the cubicle, as closely to the two dim light sources (one of which emitted a constant hum) as possible. after that, the process was that of waiting and observing. some of the plants responded well (at least initially) to the conditions and bloomed on regular basis. others started to grow fragile and transparent immediately and they did so in really fast pace, as if lack ever has its temporal limits.

in progress.

Image by Untel

“..Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. THALATTA! THALATTA! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look..”

..

ZARATHUSTRA:
I still live, I still think, I will walk in the dark, in the streets of unknown and terror even tomorrow night, I still have to live, for i still have to think, I will play the oud and hum a pleasant.. sum, ergo cogito, cogito, ergo sum.. It is the Night of Measures tonight when first words were uttered and the last ones. It is a grand night, better than a thousand months and peace, break of the days is fast approaching, let us make night prayers then, wake up!

NARRATOR:
The fruit, the fountain, the flame.

ZARATHUSTRA:
Wake, pray and tonight everyone permits himself a wish, a dear thought. I, too, have a wish for myself my child the dead father and the woman yet to come, the first thought to run across my heart tonight, a thought that would be the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth:

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer.”

NARRATOR:
These are not your own words Zarathustra the minstrel, this is not your own wish.

ZARATHUSTRA:
The Night of Measures is the night of reading, I am the offspring of what I read, I am the dweller of the cities which were printed in black ink.

Zarathustra’s oud playing gradually becomes faster and faster and turns into a loud noise and he starts crying.

ZARATHUSTRA:
A yes-sayer I wish to be, a great and decisive stroke of midday, whose solitude they will call a flight, who will bring forth the earth its warmth but I shall have no care for hope.

NARRATOR:
What has happened to your voice Zarathustra? It has become a woman’s voice!

Zarathustra now speaks with a woman’s voice and is crying.

ZARATHUSTRA:
I want to break the altar of time! I want to go where someone else has gone once! Where women dress up in light colors, yellows, blues and whites, some dance bare-breasted, others recline and men shall shoot arrows to the lightnings.

NARRATOR:
The night, without a sound, will take you into her arms.

ZARATHUSTRA:
And he, my child the dead father, that woman who is yet to come, shall be the conqueror of what subsists, and what is lost. That woman, here and yonder, even stronger, can smell the smells, taste the tastes, and he is pregnant with time that has been, that is to be, that is to arrive right here, that woman, the knight, who, without a sound, will wrap me in earth and air at once, he who is both act of unbeing and of gods..

ZARATHUSTRA:
One day he must come!

The cry ends with a shriek in Zarathustra’s woman’s voice, and echoes.

The loud, noisy oud ends suddenly, with the accompaniment of single, loud drum beat coinciding with the end of the shriek. An improvized oud solo begins and continues for a minute accompanied by a woman humming and gradually moving away. Her voice and the oud mix with the city sounds at dawn.

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A short piece with two ATM machines
and a distant car alarm.

Image by Untel.