Zeynep Sayın

The salvation of humanity is in its shame.
Tarkovsky, Solaris.

The old must be let go of no matter how painful this is. There needs to be destruction to create the new even though we don’t know the consequences, we know this, I said to Gambetti. There is no turning back, wrote Thomas Berhanhard, we are all burdened by shame, and we wish to destroy it, delete it by writing about it, annihilate it for our salvation. However, we understand destruction as harming, disintegrating, separating, ruining, destroying, changing the originality of and distorting an established thing and when we do not think of it as a metamorphosis we attempt to protect the status quo. We think that the worst status quo is the best comfort zone, the results of change are uncertain and that even when the status quo is uncomfortable, it is at least the order that we are accustomed to. It is a shameful thing that the word “to destroy” carries a note of guilt as if we are demolishing something over somebody and turns the sound of the “note” into meanings such as giving a “diplomatic note” or notifying. The main character of the novel smells hypocrisy, violence and national socialism in the air of his own country and leaves it to settle in Rome. When he receives a telegram giving the news of the deaths of his mother, father and brother, the novel turns into the story of a confrontation with his family history, in which his mother saw her daughters as babies and dressed them as babies and his 40-year-old sisters still lived under the domination of their mother’s urge of playing games. The novel, Extinction, continues to become a holistic criticism of the Australian society and being an Austrian or the story of the main character preparing himself to have an encounter with where he was born once again. Carlo Ginzburg, born in Torino if not in Rome, claims that he understood a long time ago that the country to which one belongs is not the one he loves or hates as is always claimed but the country for which he feels shame and shame can be a connection stronger than love. As is Thomas Bernhard connected to Austria with shame, so did Nazan Azeri feel it, in a way that came all over her like a sudden illness and made her scowl, at breakfasts during which girls are tortured with white cheese, tomatoes and olives on plastic kitchen tables covered with oilskin tablecloths. The fact that the forks are not on the right, but the left of the plate shows that this tool does not carry a bourgeoise meaning but reminds that this word, in Turkish, meant an agricultural implement of two or more teeth until the era of II. Mahmud. Nazan Azeri used not the spoon but the end of a knife to get some jam from the table. Long haired girl-dolls endowed with pearl necklaces on their necks and placed on the man’s bed in a position ready for the man to jump on them at any moment suggested a strange lot of traditions that could not adapt to the speed of transition from rural life to urbanism but still tried to protect the status quo which could not help but went under a metamorphosis. Forks, which were agricultural implements with teeth, skipped the knives on the table and turned into tools of sado-masochistic practices. This was the shame felt because of a society, where the mothers of the families, who did not even know how to put on make-up, dragged their daughters, as vanity cases, to become brides. Giving a daughter away as a bride could still be an act performed in return for money even in the new millennium, just like prostitution. What was important was not that the brides were living beings or had souls but that they could be bought and sold. Daughters and animals were subject to the law of commerce and property. If no one claimed the good carried in the freight section of the planes, the good belonged to the state. Being a bride meant to come from the outside as a stranger to the house, becoming a later addition to the residence and staying in it. This stranger was not someone that came this day and could leave the next. Stranger was someone who came this day and stayed the next. Women were strangers that came from the outside and stayed inside. The word “güvey” which meant “groom” in Turkish also meant “the one who waits”. This word later turned into “damat” which meant “the owner of the wedding” but the “owner of the wedding” also came to own the bride: Penelope, lying in bed in garters and oversized high heeled shoes, was waiting for the Odysseus, lying with his back turned to her. “The World House”, which is an idiom in Turkish for wedding, was the house of the groom while the world was a strange planet. Those who did not feel ashamed of the “World House” were the perpetrators and the partners of the crime. As I write these words, the genocide in Gazza continues and Netanyahu is cheered at the U.S. Congress, massacring of animals is legalized in the National Assembly of my country and resolutions for confiscating the goods of dual citizens of Israel and the Republic of Turkey, who have done their military service in Israel, are proposed. Another disgraceful offence was to turn girls into dolls for men. Nazan Azeri could face the shame that erases the distinction between the physical body and the political body and that invades her body, emotions and thoughts, not through the pieces of the woman bodies but only through dolls. This was a shame that resembled the disgust of Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Cindy Sherman and to some extent, Nur Koçak. The white cheese stuffed into the mouth, which does not and could not open, of the doll sat at the breakfast table, the lipstick that overflows all over the mouth as the doll is taught to put it on in front of the mirror, which turns into an act of phallic violence… these were similar to the huge land and wealth inherited by the characters in Bernhard novels and Nazan Azeri, who wanted to rid of this constricting womanhood training, the cheese and the lipstick, stripped her mother’s wedding dress off the body of her mother who is no longer alive and let it go off into the mountains, hills and the winds just like the Bernhard characters distributed the inheritance unmeaningfully between their relatives. These were scattered around and turned into an economy of dissipation. The shame that came with disgust, then, flew off and the wedding dress was entangled on the branches of trees. The violence inflicted on women’s bodies alternated with the violence inflicted on the bodies of the trees, one entangled on the other. Dead bodies needed to be topsoiled (Herakleitos, § 96), The old had to be let go of and destroyed no matter how painful this is. There needed to be destruction to create the new even though we don’t know the consequences. Nazan Azeri had a performance artwork titled “Growing Up”, in which the artist used first the dolls and then her own body. Here, the artist destroyed the already dead bodies of living and non-living dolls, which did not even belong to them, and opened them up to a new life, turning them into topsoil. She covered their bodies with an anti-shroud, a thin membrane of cotton, and the seeds greened by themselves just like the beans or lentils that every child grows in wet cotton. The germinating, sprouting, greening bodies were turning into plants. This was a method of interpreting the violence with irony for the artist. It was as if the inheritance was being spread around like topsoil instead of being distributed between relatives and the inheritance was germinating and flowering as it was spread. The artist had tried this previously not with plastic bodies but with plastic machine guns. Maybe it was possible to rid of shame if a transition could be made between bodies and plants if not between bodies and guns. Guns were not to bring to life, to multiply, to grow and to sustain but to castrate, to remain the same and to protect the status quo. Growing Up could possibly take away the shame that turned the prosthetics of the body into a gun with a phallic violence. Maybe, this could be a way of emergence to enlightenment from his self-imposed immaturity, in Austria, Turkey or on earth. Annihilation, Alex Garland, 2018. It was as if living and non-living dolls and lentil seeds were the same and came from a single cell. It was as if the method of new cell creation in single cell organisms that enabled reproduction, growth, development and renewal was mitotic division in which the structure and number of chromosomes did not change but on the contrary, the old cells were renewed, the wounds were healed, and the tissues were formed. Annihilation was for more life. It was not possible to change or to grow without being annihilated. Bodies could be wrapped in cotton or plants that one could not bring himself/herself to step on could be scattered; growing plants in cotton, not pruning, injuring the body or turning it into a plant was something special but it was not unique to Nazan Azeri. She was able to rest by changing, (Herakleitos, § 116) not by protecting the status quo. There was another novel, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, in addition to Thomas Bernhard’s novel, which was also turned into a movie. It was as if the works of the artist swayed between Annihilation and Extinction and the act of becoming plant reminded of the scenes of metamorphosis in this other novel. The novel turned into a movie began with a narration of cell division and as a biologist woman with a military past lectured in a classic Hollywood fiction of adverse nature/civilization protected by guns, the fiction was suddenly reversed with a spark that accompanied the scene, from a military science-fiction to a narrative that extended to mitotic division. As the other plants like the chacruna plant conveys its own knowledge to human-beings, Annihilation was a visual narrative in which the full-geared woman who set out with the biologist looking for her husband in a quarantined zone came to see their technical weapons became totally meaningless and that time and matter were transitional. It was also a narrative where women turned into plants, being reminded that all life came from a single cell… a narrative in which directions concerning the past and the future went astray. The shame of responding with a gun to a universe in which everything is broken and water or blood, which are alive, can change their molecular structure with the frequency of a melody or raising girls as dolls for men turns into annihilation and annihilation turns into metamorphosis as if all life starting from a single cell forms the basic spine of the holy family. The Forgotten Time and the Now and the Holy Family, is articulated to Nazan Azeri’s creation process right at this point. Red and blue figures -Mother Mary and the baby Jesus-, fetuses, women, birds, fish, plants, reptiles and other animals are articulated to each other, multiplying each other, as in the holy family iconography. This is a family that did not only contain the holy virgin Mary and her son but contained all that was living and not living, in which deer could turn into children, women could turn into sea creatures and fish into birds. This was a family that traced the subconscious of the globe and the centuries that extended from fairy tales to Ovidius and stood out against this morning whence the law for the massacring of animals passed. The system that raised girls as dolls for men and the act of murder that sent stray animals to death were the one and the same. Genocide of nature or of a race of people were the results of the same violence. Humans had races, this was true, but this was the result of a growth that was distributed among all living creatures from generation to generation. With the image of heaven and earth and the image of a world where the elements are transitive, one could possibly go beyond all distinctions including the one between the world of the image and the “World House”, and a sphere of influence greater than the talks in the national assembly, signature campaigns or rallies could be opened. Another reason that the artist uses canvas made of cotton instead of linen was, maybe, to grow the image on cotton. Every wish was an image, and every image was also a wish. So, it is...

Burgazada, July 30, 2024