Broken Memory and Natal Alienation

Andréas Lang's photography exhibition entitled "Broken Memories" is curated by Refik Akyüz and Serdar Darendeliler and it opened at DEPO on April 18...

I came across Lang's photograph before the opening, as I was invited to write a piece about the exhibition. For a few months, I lived in the shadow of these photographs, trying to listen to and understand the stories hidden within them. Lang's selection of photographs traces the Armenian heritage in Turkey, including the ruins of churches, houses and monasteries, hybrid structures that emerge from the combination of two incompatible architectural styles of two different eras, and natural environments with an unsettling tranquility. The first question I asked myself, especially when I first saw the photographs of Armenian heritage, was why my knowledge of the stories carried by  these ruined architectural structures frozen in time was so limited. These buildings were the proof of a vibrant social life in their time, and they still strive to carry the spirit of that time to the present. However, I, and perhaps many Armenians like myself who were born and raised in Istanbul, had limited knowledge about these ruined buildings or the life around them.  The fact that I was born into an Armenian family in Istanbul, that I attended an Armenian school for my primary education, and that I am interested in cultural heritage and art to a certain extent was not enough for me to recognize the spaces that Lang's lens brought to an exhibition space. The ruined churches, monasteries and houses, standing with a dignified stance between standing upright and being demolished, resonated with my inner world, but their stories were missing, often even absent.

For example, one of my favorite photographs in the exhibition is of the Surp Sarkis Church in Diyarbakır. Although I have been to Diyarbakır many times, I have neither heard the story of this church and the buildings that should have been around it, nor seen its ruined state. However, through this photograph, which was also included in Lang's exhibition brochure, I was caught up in the splendor and sadness of this building. In this photograph, I could sense a peculiar feeling that corresponded to the stories that were whispered in my own family without ever taking a solid shape. It also bore the traces of a looted, abandoned and forgotten existence that followed a vibrant living space that embraced a community. After a little research, I learned that this old church was also used as a school, burned down during the events of 1894-95, and after 1915 "churches and schools were used by the confiscators for many different functions such as paddy factories, camel stables and granaries" (Evrensel, November 19, 2019). Another interesting photograph is of a village called Stanoz, near Sincan, where a road curves and a giant rock lies to the right. In the KarDes application, one of Hrant Dink Foundation's meticulously prepared projects, Boghos Natanian's narrative describes the village of Stanoz in the 1870s as "a village of 450 households built on the banks of a river with healing and fragrant waters and delicious fish".

We can see that the KarDes application shares the intersection of two photographs selected from two different time periods, which are far from overlapping with each other. There is no river flowing in that region anymore. Houses and the bridge are also gone. There is an image of nature at ground zero. Stories are doomed to disappear along with social and spatial death. Living in the past and carrying the stories of previous generations is a heavy burden, but the rupture that comes with the disappearance of the flow of everyday life life fills one with the urge to mend a shredded fabric and fasten the pieces together. In a recent conversation we had at DEPO, Lang said that he took the photographs in the exhibition by letting his intuition guide him. He first listened to the call of a place, a ruin, and then completed his story with his research. As a photographer who has positioned himself as a "visual archaeologist", the route he followed and the choices he made were understandable. While I was having a reckoning with myself about not knowing this place and not being privy to its stories, I came across the concept of natal alienation used by Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born American sociologist who works in the field of racism. The images Lang conveyed to the audience through photographs showed us that there was an established social order in these regions.

The Armenians living in this region were ripped away from a regular flow of daily life. As a result of 1915 and its aftermath, social life, like the historical buildings in the region, was frozen in time. The most important consequences of social death were the loss of narratives about village life, family stories, important community experiences of cultivating the land, the use of the Armenian language in the region, holiday celebration practices, and the transference of economic and cultural heritage that were supposed to be carried from one generation to the next. Since early 2023, Parrhesia Collective has been reading Kavar Literature (roughly put, Armenian village literature, literature that emerged outside Istanbul, especially in regions where Armenians live in dense populations. Since the word Kavar also carries the meanings of climate as well as yergir, (home)land, we prefer not to translate it only as village or province, but to use the original word). In our readings, we had the opportunity to follow the vitality of village life and the pure relationship established with the land and living creatures as conveyed in Armenian by writers such as Hamasdegh and Mıntzuri. The stories hidden in Lang's photographs began to take shape for me through the texts of Kavar literature. These readings, which make us imagine a sense of vitality in response to social death, did not completely fill the feeling of incompleteness we experienced with the cessation of social practices, but they opened a space for us to enter into a dialogue with the places we were alienated from.

In describing the individual who has been exposed to natal alienation, Patterson reminds us that one is born into a society that is forced to reject or forget its history, that prevents one from participating in or knowing its traditions and conditions one to forget them.  This individual who inherits the legacy of disinheritance experiences a state of existential homelessness. When we combined our readings of Kavar literature with Lang's photographs, the stories that could not find a place in the dominant narratives and the interrupted heritage became alive again. The simple language used by the authors of village literature and the clues they gave about daily life served as a bridge to bring a life of Armenians that was left to disappear in the past to the present.

Note: If you would like to join our Kavar Literature reading and discussion group on June 26th in the evening, please contact us via our email address. The sessions will be held in Armenian.