A correspondence between Apostolis Artinos and Photini Papahatzi via email during the creation of the project Home.
Tuesday 8.3.2016
Apostolis hi.
I want to start writing to you about Home, a new project I am putting together, and ask for your thoughts on it.
In English the word Home represents the concept of home not as a structure or a building – for these the word house is employed – but rather as a feeling, an emotion. There’s also a song: A house is not a home.
‘Home’ focuses on the forced immigration and population exchanges between Turkey and Greece and corroborates the memory of that experience through artistic expression, archives, a body of research, and verbal stories. With this in mind, I would like to create and reconsider archives through a research process – whether conducted on archives or on the field – as well as through a process of collecting (collecting texts, images, data, maps and videos, as well as interviews or discussions like ours). Home takes as its starting point my grandmother’s house in Burdur, which you can see here. This is a photograph given to me by my cousin, Kostas G. from Veroia. His father who had been to Burdur was the one who noted down the address next to it in Turkish as well as in English.
Because of my parents’ origins – my father was Greek from Egypt and my mother was originally from Asia Minor – there was neither a ‘family’ home as such, nor a village for me to go back to, but there were not any particularly close ties to family either, which was particularly liberating… My childhood memories of summer vacations were from hotel complexes or rented touristy, picturesque rooms and contact with relatives was sparse. The village family home however remained a point of reference throughout my childhood: I remember being envious of my classmates who spent their summer holidays as well as Easter and Christmas breaks in the ‘family’ home in their village of origin.
Turkey is a country I know very little about and what I know is from the stories my mother used to tell me, stories she had heard from her own mother: my grandmother had come to Greece from someplace in Anatolia in 1922 when she was 19 years old. She had come from Burdur where, according to a family member, there exists still a house. For years this issue of origin had not been of any interest to me. In recent years however, perhaps following my return to Greece, or due to my move to Epirus where the first thing someone you meet asks is where you ‘re from, and maybe partly also as a result of the projects I have worked on, my thoughts keep returning to this house as a symbol of origin and belonging. I thought that, even if the house itself no longer exists, I would still like to know whether ‘home’ does, see if the familiarity is still there, look for the link between Greeks and Turks that broke after so many years of peaceful coexistence, before there were nations and countries to divide them, when they still lived together as part of a multicultural empire. Is it possible perhaps to forge a connection with this unknown and yet familiar place and its people, with a culture that is so familiar and yet so distant? What does this home actually mean?
I will write to you more in the next few days.
Thank you.
Photini.
Wednesday, 9.3.2016
Photini,
Thank you for your invitation to participate.
The “family home”, strictly speaking, does not exist. Εspecially in your case where lived experience is lacking, it is more a loss, a deficit, and for this reason an imaginary escape. The family home is a category of the psyche, a condition of the psyche as Bachelard puts it, and for this reason it is hard to objectively define. At its heart is embedded a fragment of life, which cannot be traced within that space because what placed it there and gave it life is a contained experience of the self, a unique and intransmissible being in space and time. It seems to be a utopia, a blank spot that projects onto itself all the emotions of the imaginary; a poetic, imaginary allure that provokes its objectification and its formulation when it is consolidated only in daydreaming and in its mnemonic creation; both foundational expressions of dwelling, fantasy operations that of course we cannot resist. We always enjoy going back. But going back where? To the untraceable, to the allure of an imaginary image by which we were at one point narcissistically transfixed. We live within the desolation of its impossible resembling. We are being tried in its agony. We are literally abandoned within it, devoted to the reassembling of its fragments, to the healing of these cracks.
I am under the impression that your uncle’s photograph, which bears his handwriting, records a promise or a mnemotechnic recall rather than the possibility of something real. In case of course you do discover it in the alley of that city the experience will be even more uncanny, an experience of the other, a variation, this durability of structures, their malleability, the common use of space that is being offered, that is being appropriated but remains intact through this defamation. As a sign I had once come across in the Chora of Amorgos read, “Mine today, yours tomorrow”. We leave our traces onto structures and in turn structures exhaust us and fully deplete us in our emotional affect. So, it’s beautiful what you are setting out to do, this quest for a trace onto the body of the real, on its maps and addresses. Keep me up to date…
Apostolis
Friday, 11.3.2016
Apostolis hi
I have already discovered the house! Technology you see leaves no room for the imaginary…I found it on google maps where the attached is from.
“Nostalgia for something we didn’t experience / and yet this was what our whole life was about”. The verses are from the poem “The Great Nostalgia” by Tasos Leivaditis. This is the emotion that you are referring to: traces borrowed from narratives for something that I myself never experienced and yet it was what accompanied me throughout my entire life, like an echo, coming and going unannounced: neither of my two parents looked to the past with nostalgia, they always referred to it in association with something else. No, my ancestry had not been a big part of my life – yet another liberation – still, this house, as something that is located far away, is the springboard to leaving one’s country as Cassin has noted, instead of being the purpose of return. This constant search for the “far-away-home” throughout the years is a life pattern and now this symbol of an identity of some sort has finally become visible. This odyssey, this narrativization of identity – again in the words of Cassin – deconstructs its symbols before it even encounters them.
And the other thing is that this family house of mine is not actually “paternal” but “maternal”. As the plane descended towards Izmir this intense feeling came over me and I wondered where it had come from. Is it perhaps part of my cultural heritage, or my school education, or is it maybe part of a wound that as I recently read can be transferred through DNA?
We ‘ll be in touch
Photini
Tuesday, 15.3.2016
Photini,
Google maps is imaginary par excellence…It is the imaginary of a technological real, of the digital real. The contemporary reality of the screen sets the terms and limits of a novel visibility which redigitizes our world in its own, unique terrain. Google View does not simply scan the world, but reinvents it, and offers it up to the occurrence state of its digital nature. Google Street View images are the loneliest images in the world, not only due to our inability to archaeologize them but also due to the censorship that characterizes them: they are images devoid of life, views of deserted cities and streets, landscapes that are literally uninhabited. Every time I look at them they cause me an unconsolable sadness so I refer to them as the images of loneliness. We find ourselves where there is nothing and no one. And on the other hand, precisely because these images trace the reality of the world, they are also images of a deep emotion. I have also stood gazing down at the family home for a long time, a family home that for me too is maternal (my mother now lives there alone). I zoom in, I descend and enter its field, I make out its brick roof, the foliage of the trees in the garden and then, as I attempt to get closer, I am left perplexed and disappointed at the pixeling of its image. A descent out of this world in the attraction of a familiar reference and what always remains in the end is the pixel, its dominance, and its denegation. In Cassin’s “Nostalgia”, the work I presume you are referring to, the ancestral house of man is language. Man is this being that is devoted to language and to its representations, and this is also his very own loneliness. Cassin also notes the untranslatable that exists within languages, that which does not cease (not) to be translated, and as such remains active in its difference. The Google View image is for me then that which is untranslatable, an uncanny trace, the trace of the loss of the world that nevertheless insists on its truth and verisimilitude. I am certain that what you ‘ll find in Burdur, despite it being the trace of the other, will not be the trace of an absolute alterity but simply the place of man and of his agony.
Apostolis
Sunday, 27th of March 2016
Good morning, Apostolis,
I am currently sorting all the practicalities of my trip and carrying on with my research also, and as a result I am falling behind on our correspondence. Through Naz, who is my partner from Turkey in the project, I got in touch with someone in the neighborhood who knows of the house – In February my third cousin from Veroia, whom I recently found out about, also visited the area. On my way back from Romania I made a stop in Veroia to meet him. I also met some of my cousins that I had not seen in 30-40 years – Home was what triggered that too! – and they will be waiting for me there. At the same time I am discovering all these relatives and the complicated division of the family tree with stories hidden in its every branch. This is the route that I’m going to follow from Burdur to Izmir https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=z7Hd5TyQ6_lQ.k_msYWddMV78 It’s the same route my grandmother took on a September morning in 1922 when she was 19 years old: They knocked on their door and told them that it was best to leave; war had just broken out and they would get slaughtered. Her father was already being held captive in what they then called labor camps but friends of the family who hid him saved his life. There were four women: great-grandmother Varvara, her two daughters Photini and Rahil, and her cousin Marina. They all got on a horse-carriage and left for Izmir. On their way there they encountered mobsters and had to give away their jewelry in order to save their lives. They managed to get to Izmir. There they boarded a ship called ‘Odyssey’. They arrived in Piraeus with nothing. After some time the family was reunited with my grandfather who had also managed to escape and come to Greece.
This photograph is from Veroia and dates to the time of the occupation. My mother is the little girl in the middle holding a flower in her hand. My grandmother is just above; she must be 40-44 years old in that picture. They were living in Athens before but when people there started eating mice in order not to starve my grandfather said that the children should go away otherwise they would die, they should go to Veroia, to our relatives there, they would be better off there.
I will write to you again later.
Photini
Tuesday, 29th of March 2016
Photini
These old family photographs often turn out to be our origins; fictional narratives that nevertheless entail a position of the real; a nostalgia for death that is substantiated in the gaze of the Other. For me, the grandmother’s clenched lips but also the terrified look on the face of the young boy standing on the bottom right serve as the punctum of this photograph; this awkwardness caused by the medium of photography to people of that long gone era; their otherworldly radiance enveloping them in that moment like a somber veil. A deadly stillness as Barthes describes it. It’s like they‘re standing in the eye of a hurricane, in this, the eye of the photographic camera. It’s as if they endure their imprint as the still fate that life has set out for them, dark and predestined. The photograph is the Other of the Other, as it exposes the range of the world, in this case its ghosts, creatures beyond their biological being. Today, amidst our addiction to images, we cannot empathize with the impression the people of that time were left with when they were confronted with their own image, with their unitary trace.
Again the punctum – as I see it – in the map that you sent me. Izmir, Aydin, Isparta and Antalya. Traces of my own language. Not the Burdur of your own ending. I don’t know what it is that drags us here and there, that abandons us in certain parts of the map. What is it that we look for on the grounds of the real? What is it if not the points of our escape, the traces of its total denegation? What I’m trying to say is that what draws us back every time through time and space is the promise of a utopian stay, of an Other that unfolds my being in the horizon of an expectation. In the map that you sent me there is also the option: Add destination. And I’m left feeling as awkward as Giuliana in Antonioni’s Red Desert, who, taken aback and enchanted at the same time, looks with her lover at the map of her own escape, a map that will perhaps lead her nowhere.
Apostolis X
Monday, 4th of April 2016
Good morning, Apostolis.
The only country is language, says Hannah Arendt.
My great-grandfather, Giorgos Tsoloz, and later on Tsolozides, and my great-grandmother Varvara, were Karamanlides, Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians who wrote Turkish in Greek alphabet characters. My great-grandfather was section manager, collecting taxes for the Ottoman administration. When they started sending Greeks to the labour camps (amele taburu), which was essentially part of the Ethnic cleansing, a Turkish family of friends hid him and saved him and so he was able to reunite with his family in Athens after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In this project of creating nations that was the inhumane decision for the exchange of populations, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were expected to be part of a particular nation on the basis of their religion. They were expected to live within the physical borders of this nation regardless of whether they even spoke the language. Meanwhile, they felt deeply nostalgic for the home they had left behind.
The little child in the photograph is Antonakis. His mom, the tall lady standing, married a man from Verοia. It was an arranged marriage. This man was suffering from some sort of psychological condition and it was thought that marriage would do him good. Antonakis suffered from depression: he saw his father take his life by hanging himself.
Until yesterday I used to think that the population exchanges that took place on the basis of the treaty of Lausanne was the hardest and most awful decision that one could have arrived at for the people made to move without having been given a choice, without having been asked how they felt, having been forced to, from that point onwards, to think of themselves in a completely different way, burying their previous lives in the land of their ancestors. Today, on a day marked by Europe’s infringement of the Geneva Convention of human rights with refugees being sent back to Turkey, I’m left with the impression that the scale of brutality has expanded to unparalleled levels. Once again, our land is involved; once again the wound is activated.
P.S. A “new” cousin sent me the book in the picture
Photini
Tuesday, 5th of April 2016
Photini
Country is language, but which is the “country” of language? And at the end of the day, what is language? Arendt’s example is characteristic because Arendt is a linguistic problem. Arendt’s language, the language in which Arendt recognizes herself, the German language, is neither the language of the land of her fathers, nor the language of the Germany of her childhood. The German language raises within it an impossible reference. Because language cannot be located, it cannot be mapped; language is. This is why Arendt felt in her time in exile that she was sent away not from Germany, but from her Germanic maternal language. But “the maternal language is already a language of the Other” Derrida will say. Seen in this light her nostalgia was nostalgia for loss. Arendt belongs to the deep cuts brought upon her by this language. Language does not simply express her, it bears her, it is her very own idiom. And on the other hand, this language is a language that negates her personal history, that expunges her from another language, Hebrew, and as a result turns her into a ghost of the world. Arendt, this Jewish who does not belong to her identity, who does not belong to any national identity, was in exile before her time in exile, because language is a trace, it is a denegation. Language that overwhelms me and language that abandons me. Arendt belongs to this denegated self of hers, to her wandering, to this impossible nostalgia that moves her deeply, to the nowhere of belonging; and it is for this reason that this woman was a scandal to both the Jewish and the German communities. Because it was impossible to naturalize her linguistic trace. Trace is loss, only loss…
Meanwhile, what can I possibly say about this inhumanity of sending refugees back to Turkey, back to “an unsafe country”, an act which stands in stark opposition to international law? I recognize – in a somber mood only – the resistances of the political act when faced with the question of the foreigner, the other, and the need to provide hospitality. An act that is pioneering in the nucleus of how hospitality is perceived, of the hospitable space, its dominance and legality. Τhe unconditional, unequivocal hospitality, a poetic act, as Derrida characterizes it, brings us face to face with our resilience, moral and political. “Language is hospitality”, says Emmanuel Levinas; in this way the guest is hosted within my language, within its limits and resistances, and it is for this reason that perhaps only a forgotten language can welcome the other and build up friendship. Regarding the issue of the foreigner we will always be faced with a failure, with a state of mourning in which we will not even be able to mourn and that, is a double failure.
As for Antonakis in the photograph and his mother, words fail me…
Warm Regards.
Apostolis
Sunday, 10th of April 2016
Apostolis
I write to you from the Otel Tunali hotel located in the centre of Ankara. The spot where the terrorist attack took place the other day is not too far from here.
I arrived yesterday, yet I have the impression I have been here for longer. Just before I left, 20 mins before I boarded the plane actually, I received a phone call from my partner informing me that the tummy ache my son was suffering from for the last three days – who was turning 11 yesterday – was not a case of the stomach flu but acute appendicitis, which meant he had to go into surgery. Logic tells me this is a routine operation, but I was in such a state until I found out he was ok. An unexpected feeling that paralyzes you, that makes you feel numb.
I stayed with my partners Naz and Oguz in their beautiful, 60’s-architecture home in the centre of Ankara. The pace here is slow, despite all these alarming references, the place where the terrorist attack took place last March, the fear…I had to leave their house as I’m allergic to cats…They have two…The one has mental issues, as soon as she sees you she starts retreating with such an alarmed expression on her face. The other is just here to keep her company. And still, my lungs couldn’t take it. Today I presented images taken by my students in photography, images by contemporary Greek photographers, images from the Photometria festival, some of my own as well as some of the project I’m working on. A woman attending came up to me during the break and said, “I get and I feel what you are saying because I too am from the other side. My family came from Thessaloniki with the population exchanges and I have also heard all the stories. Please come by the house tomorrow, you’ll see, my mother has turned it into a sort of museum”.
Such an irony, Antonakis became a lottery salesman…
It just started to rain. I can hear the Imam.
Good night.
P.S. The photograph is from Gezi Park in front of my hotel that today, on a Saturday, was packed with crowds.
Monday, 11th of April 2016
Photini
I’m thinking that we all owe it to ourselves to be faithful to our roots, to our inherited self. After all, we are all in a constant, ambiguous relationship with it. At times we choose to ignore it, and at others we suffer its weight, it exhausts us and we exhaust it within us, transfixed by nostalgia. Sometimes our self subjects us to inhumane, cruel tasks: to bear its image. This house-museum of the mother of that lady you met at the presentation. Tell me, did you actually visit her? I believe we are all accountable to this family memory; a memory that predetermines us, and concerns not only the previous year, but also the next. We respond to the memory, to the time we have inherited – to an extent, and for many of us, time that has not been experienced but is still recorded in our cellular being. So we owe something here, and similarly, we are owed. We owe to rediscover it, and it owes to get hold of us once again also, both in their different ways. Past, similarly to language, does not belong to us. Neither can be appropriated; when we take them over we idly surrender ourselves to their representations. They both compose an impossible genealogy to which we are obliged to give ourselves over creatively.
In the photograph you sent me of Gezi Park I see the nonchalance of people. A nonchalance of the moment perhaps? In the same park that a year ago witnessed a violent indignation a young couple is now enjoying the sun. A fallow period of time perhaps or the melancholy of politics, the disappointment and the inertia it causes. And on the other hand I say no, this must be the natural state of people, the nonchalance under the sun. You will also tell me what your impressions were.
Antonakis – with his perplexed look in the photograph – who came face to face with his father having hanged himself, now exhausts his own life…
Apostolis
Monday, 11th of April 2016
Apostolis, good morning.
I am writing from the hotel just before I leave to catch the bus for Burdur at 14.30.
Yes, I did visit the house-museum of Ismet, grandmother of Gulay. There was so much I wanted to write to you about yesterday, but for now this picture will have to do – perhaps because I want to ‘introduce’ them to you, even just a little bit, before I ‘meet’ them. The photograph was taken in 1929 in Athens, that is 7 years after the great exodus from Asia Minor. In the bottom, from left to right are my great-grandmother Varvara and my great-grandfather Giorgos Tsoloz. They both came to this place they had to recognize as their ‘country’ without even speaking its language. The look in my great-grandfather’s eyes. Exactly on top is my grandmother Photini and next to her is Anastasia Manea, a sculptor and the wife of the man in uniform next to her, Pantelis, brother of Photini. On the other side of Photini is her sister Rahil and next to her, her two nephews, Kosmas and Vasilia Saroglou – their mother is Kiriaki – Photini’s third sister – sat in the front with the child in her arms, the child who is now the only one still living.
Photini
Monday, 11th of April 2016
Photini
So, on the road to Burdur…
I wrote to you before about that deadly stillness that characterizes people of that time in their photographs. It is like they were elsewhere. And they were actually elsewhere. They were abandoned to their image, to the trace of their physical loss. The act of photography, exceptional as it was at that time, was rendering people dead. The people depicted were assuming a pose of death; it was like a rehearsal of death. Maybe some of them truly believed they were in danger in the presence of that turned-vampire medium. They were becoming – as we all become in our pictures – posthumous objects to be remembered. After all photographs are always photographs of others. My image is the Other. Death is the Other of life. The faces in the photograph you sent me could be dead people posing. In the Victorian times that the two photographs I am sending date from, they used to position the dead next to their living relatives and take their photograph. They had also invented various mechanisms in order for the corpses to stand upright so as to not give away the fact that they were dead. Dead and living, all with the same look on their faces, with the same rigidity, all together in the spectrum of Death.
Warm regards
Apostolis.
Monday, 11th of April 2016
Apostolis,
I write to you from the bus to Burdur, the Polydorio of ancient times. The bus is super modern, there’s wifi, a tv screen on the back of every seat and there’s also coffee, sweets, sandwiches and soft drinks on offer. The young waiter is almost embarrassed that he is not able to communicate with me in English and he is so polite. Yunanistan, Ι say to him realizing that he came running having just memorized ‘where are you from’ in English.
You are right, in the early days of photography, posing was forced and painful due to the technology of the time. Photographers had come up with some devices that were attached to the backs of the photographed subjects in order for them to be able to remain still more easily for the time it took for the much desirable photograph to be captured. This is why people rarely smile in the photographs of that time. It’s not possible to smile and stay still for a whole ten minutes! The families of Epirus immigrants used to send photographs from weddings, christenings and other similar events including funerals to the gastarbeiters working in Germany.
Grandmother Ismet’s house, who passed away a year and a half ago, the grandmother of Gulay, who upon hearing of my project invited me over, is full of objects that the grandmother collected to preserve memory as Gulay says. These range from personal items and souvenirs brought to her by her many grandchildren from their travels, to objects that she had bought in second-hand shops or from tradesmen whose trades were going out of fashion and whose tools were becoming obsolete. Old scales, plastic flowers, miniature porcelain elephants, heavy hand-carved furniture, sideboards that had traveled through the centuries, works of embroidery displayed in frames she had designed herself, mirrors, coffee-tables, vases from China and from other parts of the world, models of famous sculptures, dolls, porcelain deer figurines. Grandmother and grandfather had come from Thessaloniki with the exchange. The photograph dates back to the period when they had gotten engaged.
This debt that you are referring to is what Gulay felt I think and invited me over. Listening to the stories that she used to hear since she was a child she felt a certain kinship: the only thing that changes is the positioning on the map. How they left from Thessaloniki, what their life there was like, their search for a place that reminded them of their home. Gulay too searched for what we had in common, in the Turkish coffee, the Turkish delights, and the kurabiye sweets. And there was something in common in the baby that was left behind in order for its cry not to give them away as they were crossing and was only reunited with its mother because it was saved by the soldier. These same stories, again and again, here and there, then and now. “I feel that the history of the house is coming to an end,” Gulay told me when we finally reached the storage space with the pile of carpets, the grandmother’s untapped frames, the chairs in their plastic bags. I looked for her in her drawers, in her pink cushions. When a person finishes its trace stays behind. In his or her house.
In a room where she used to sit there was a picture of Kemal opposite Obama. Before it was Clinton said Gulay. Why, I ask her: because they are both powerful men, she believes Obama is the most powerful man on the planet.
In the vitrine-shelf below, on top of the Gondola souvenir from Venice, hang photographs of her proud grandsons in military attire and Kalashnikovs in their hands. Before I leave she gives me the Quran her family had printed in memory of their ancestors as a gift.
Photini
Tuesday, 12th of April 2016
Photini
Nostalgia hoards, it overwhelms us with mementos, it displays the traces of our origin, it opens us up to a fantasy maze, to a perverted seeing, it constructs a scene of visibility, and abandons us there stunned and speechless. I have seen spaces similar to the house of grandmother Ismet. They are spaces of weakness but also spaces of visual seducement. The gaze of the occupant nests everywhere, in every nook and corner. Spaces that have a tendency to show-off and attest their peculiarity and perversity through a million different objects. They are matrix spaces, time machines that establish a heterotopic condition of living. Nostalgia, as a phantasy scene, needs its cocoon, these drawers of Ismet’s, the family photographs, the old frames, and the embroideries of her childhood years, even Obama’s portrait, an object of pilgrimage for the defeated. They are all objects that make up for the lack of the Other through revealing scenes that play host to its trace, to a promise only. Usually these spaces are kitsch environments but ones that manage to record the personal trace. When it comes to the status of things and objects we should probably challenge the authority of aesthetics. Its morality is not an aesthetics of the familiar if I may put it that way. Moreover, nostalgia does not manifest itself in public; it does not reveal its elements in a public space, as it would instantaneously collapse in its new symbolic context. Nostalgia is in need of its secret corner, a place that is out of the way. These houses-museums belong to their founders and to them only, to the hands that erected them, to the eyes that fell for their promises. It might be too emotional for Gulay but the only thing that she can do with this material reserve of nostalgia – in a best case scenario – is to store it. The chairs in their plastic covers that you photographed in her storage space are the trace of that intense feeling of the other. Nostalgia is a linguistic pain, a dedication that nevertheless cannot be transmitted in whole.
So, what did you think of Burdur?
Apostolis
Wednesday, 13th of April 2016
Good afternoon, Apostolis.
I arrived in Burdur on Monday evening. I headed to a state guesthouse that charges very little, routinely hosting teachers and professors but also open to whomever else wants to stay there. I was so excited I couldn’t stay in despite the light rain. According to the GPS on my phone the Ulus Sokak Street was only 14 minutes away. I went out and started walking in the wet streets. At one point, as I took a turn, I saw some derelict buildings. Ahead of me the street was splitting in two and looking at my phone I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go. So I just followed my instinct. And then I saw the house. The streets were empty; oh, these pulsating streets…only one light was on in the house that looks to have been split in two. I went up to it like a thief in the night. I was unable to cry but it felt like everything around me was crying. I went back to my room. I woke up at 4 in the morning because of the muezzin’s call to prayer.
Photini
Thursday, 14th of April 2016
Photini, to be moved is movement, and it urges us to take off in the middle of the night despite the rain. Moved by nostalgia. The need for an elusive return, we locate it, and when we are there we recognize the familiarity of our memory – a memory that is our very own. Nostalgia for a floating signifier, a triumph of the imaginary. It is not the place; rather it is the experience of place within time, the immateriality that characterizes it, that entrenches it in our psyche. But then again space is the only part of this experience that is tangible, its most real and convincing reference. Convincing according to our own narrations of course, as the gap at the centre of our nostalgia will never be filled. It’s more about an abstract Deleuzian rhizome that is inscribed upon something that we think is solid but turns out to be most fluid. Place does not define an objectivity but a relational possibility, an energy that determines it. So, in this non-objectivity of their diaspora your displaced ancestors do salvage something, a truth, the unspeakable of their existence. Nevertheless, we expend ourselves in what Cassin will term “mortal conditions”, in the accessible Burdur that there exists within each one of us as our only possibility no matter how far that may be. Faced with the invisibility of our desire, the only thing that seems able to fulfill it – and yet isn’t – is that which is the weakest by nature. We are always faced with a slip. We return home, we put our ear against the wall, and what do the walls whisper back to us? Whatever it was that resonated within us from the start.
Apostolis
Saturday, 16th of April 2016
Dear Apostolis,
On Tuesday we went to the house with Irem and Gizem, the two girls I’m staying with here in Burdur, and we knocked on the door.
But first I must explain to you the term – and role – of the mouhtaris. The mouhtaris is the elected municipal or communal public servant, the one responsible for the neighborhood. He is the link between the area and the local authority. He’s the person one goes to when they are in need of an official paper say, or when a problem arises. I had gotten hold of the phone number of the Zafer Mahallesi mouhtaris, the one in charge of Niki’s neighborhood, through my newly discovered third or fourth cousin from Veroia. Veroia is where the citizens of Burdur moved to after the exchange. This cousin of mine had coincidentally visited Burdur in February and had been to the house with the help of a municipal employee, a journalist and the mouhtaris. I had contacted him through my friends in Ankara and he was expecting me. But on that day he was out of town in business. So I ended up going with the girls.
As I wrote to you, I think the houses are two now. From what I knew from my mother the house was large, spread over two floors, with loads of paintings; they were well off. Now it’s split in two. We knocked on the door of one and there was no response. When we knocked on the door of the other the woman who came to the door looked much older than she probably was, she didn’t seem to be in very good shape and she was most likely ill. She listened to us almost in fear. My friend explained to her that my family used to live there and that I would like to have a look at the house. The woman said no. I’m sick and alone she said, I cannot let you in. If we come back with the mouhtaris will you let us in then, we asked and she said yes.
Her refusal was more of a disappointment to my friends than it was to me. I felt certain that sooner or later the doors would open and patience was all was needed. Her refusal was hard and weak at the same time: this woman who was so fragile, so vulnerable, emerging full of fear from that vast room-space behind the tall door.
We walked around the area and stopped in front of an entrance to discuss recent events. The people who lived in the house opposite, an old couple, arrived at just this moment and after my friends explained to them what had just happened they invited us in. It was a poor household: a pan of milk was on top the wood burner and they offered us some. They came from an area outside the town and they had lived in Burdur for the last four years. The milk was from that area.
The next day we met the mouhtaris and returned to the house. Mouhtaris Nuri Levent Ozer is a very nice man, about 70 years old, who with great pleasure – with passion even – took on the role of the intermediary, mediating with kindness and empathy. He was born in the area and had heard of the rich family in number 14 of the Ulus Sokak Street. We first went to the house on the left. An old woman came to the door. The house was painted in vibrant oil paint that seemed to cover the past of its walls drastically and utterly. The rooms were big and the ceilings were high. Hence it was possible to warm the rooms up by shutting the doors and dividing them. They had bought the house from its previous occupants in 1979. They had given 500 Turkish liras for it (the equivalent to 155 euros today). Her husband was a painter and there were buckets of paint lying around the house, especially the kitchen. Here was the fireplace that was used to warm up the whole house. The curtain covering it was moving to the wind.
Later she showed us to another part of the house in the floor downstairs that was used as their more official reception area. The few books in the bookcase were those of the Turkish state propaganda. On the windowsills plastic flowers emerged from their vases.
Our visit to the other house didn’t go as smoothly.
In order to let us in the woman had asked her brother to come round also. He notified us when we were still next door that his sister was not feeling too well and that it was better to speed things up. We went to the other house. It looked completely different. It was left as it was. No maintenance work had taken place. The house revealed its wooden structure. The ground floor, which was also the house’s storage space, was now where the washing machine and a kitchen equipped with just the basics were. The woman lived in the one room. Her bed was a sofa with a mattress on the side.
As soon as I entered the house I picked up my camera in order to capture the image of that scared creature in its hiding place. Colour-wise this room was diametrically different to the other house. This seemed like the basement of the unconscious, this was where the monsters of all of our fears used to hide.
Ah, no, no said the voice of the brother, no photographs, please delete the photograph now. I was surprised. I deleted it of course. The atmosphere was tense. I wanted him to see that I had deleted it. It’s not going to be published anywhere my friends assured him, we’re not from the television. His sister approached him and with a slight grin, scrunching her eyebrows, tried to put him at ease.
Her brother later explained that her husband had abused the woman so badly that she was suffering permanent psychological and bodily damage.
I was quite shaken by that story and so I was a bit nervous when went up to the first floor. It was also untouched and seemed to be crumbling under the weight of the years. The rooms were large, with high ceilings; their windows wide open bathing the wooden floor in sunlight. The light blue tones of the walls had a certain joy to them, they felt quite airy, they made you feel happy – almost.
Even the room with the fireplace with the ochre walls had a warmth to it despite the more than obvious wear and tear.
In the corridor a pair of sleepers, the fossils of duration, were patiently gathering time and dust. It was like the occupants had left thinking that they were going to return. And my grandmother, how must she have felt?...At 22 she left on that carriage with her mother, brothers and sisters. What did she dream her house in the refugee settlement in the area of Philadelphia was going to be like? In which past did she rest when she closed her eyes and what was it that it stirred in her?
Have a good night.
Photini.
Sunday, 17th of April 2016
Photini
In which past did she rest when she closed her eyes…
The one who was set aside returns even when this return is impossible and takes place when the clock strikes midnight. Return is a matter of the night. By night I do not mean the time of the day but the night of dreams. It is a secret experience and hence an impossible experience. We do not return when we go back but when we feel nostalgic. Nostalgia is an echo, an echo of the self, an internal movement rather than an external one because we always go back to the experience we have felt nostalgic for, to our familiar memory and not necessarily to a place.
What is interesting for me in the record you are creating – as a carrier of these powerful family emotions – are not the clues you are discovering but the ones that escape you. These clues that your grandmother would perhaps identify, maybe even your mother, as the more original heiress of that experience if we assume just for a minute that either of them could take this trip with you. Your grandmother would see the things that we cannot see, the hiding places of memory, and the invisible of its experience. This speechlessness of the trace that does not reveal itself to us. We are only made aware of the history of expatriation and we ignore the trace as it takes root of its life. That which is invisible and which is no longer available is what moves us emotionally. A record of the psyche that dilates the time of memories, abandoning us to its allure. This allure grounds us, distorts time from its irreversible perspective, puts people to sleep in the location of their dreams, in the folds of a secret escape, in the folds of a moment that cannot be communicated, a moment that carries in its minisculity all the inexperience of time. A revealing moment that opens up our eyes to the invisible and to the glut of its waiting. A slowness perceptible to anyone who has been cast aside and sent away, to all the first generation immigrants who remain transfixed to the memory but also to the ways of the place that they were made – violently or not – to give up. Looking at the beautiful photographs that you sent me of the interior of the house, my mind keeps going back to those clues that your grandmother’s gaze would land upon, clues that the camera failed to capture. Perhaps you will come across revelations of a similar kind, clues embedded in memory that won’t be part of your photographic record as they are ones to emerge at a later time; at the time of re-remembrance of experience. These are signals of a somewhat emotional move towards reconsideration. What we identify in this emotional gaze is also what displaces us to this gripping time that I mentioned before; similarly to images of the unconscious that appear suddenly and leave us baffled in their dominance. Our recordings within the reality of time will always be incomplete as they lack the endowment of this other time, that is also the Other of time, the time of memories.
Warm regards
Apostolis
Monday, 18th of April 2016
Good afternoon Apostolis,
Once again I’m in one of those ultramodern buses in which one moves around in Turkey that look like airplanes: They have seats similar to those of planes and each seat features a personal television screen. There’s a collection of films available while it’s also possible to access the Internet through the tv. There’s also a waiter who comes round with coffee, soft drinks and various sweets and the cost of all this is only 20 euros for a five-hour journey.
I keep thinking of how long trips took in times past and the speed of the present day which allows us to connect to the whole world while on the move: since we departed this morning I’ve written emails, I‘ve been on Skype, I have found out some good news and shared them with people in 4 different countries, I have worked and I have also stared at the landscape, but only for a little while… This alternating landscape that used to be my personal field of daydreaming, the space that provided a break from thoughts, a space and time of ideas and of feelings; this self-indulgent pleasure of fantasizing was cast aside this afternoon…
The day after the one I stayed in Burdur we visited the municipal archives. Unfortunately there are only a very few photographs that date back to that time. The whole archive of the town is located in Stefani, nowadays Teffeni, a nearby village. I’m sharing a few pictures of the era of Kemal, of the revolution and of what was essentially the time that the Turkish Republic was founded. “What did the Turks know? Only war and sheep. The Greeks taught us to read and write, they brought to us the arts, our cuisine, the craft of making a baklava…I hope that one day we can live together again, coexist in peace”, whispered the employee.
Together we visited one more house which was not in use anymore but the owner was kind enough to allow us to see. It was the house of the priest, he told us. I found a health insurance card and some tapes…the light was amazing in the way it was sneaking in, illuminating the light blue walls. Three windows bearing the traces of time. Shoes on the stairs. A coat that was left there.
The mouhtaris took us to lunch. As was the case in pretty much every place we visited Kemal’s photograph was hanging on the wall. There isn’t a single shop or place of business in Turkey that doesn’t feature a photograph of Kemal. In the afternoon we went to Isparta. So many names, and all of them so familiar.
On the next day the mouhtaris brought us gifts. A beautiful towel with the town’s logo made by people with special needs. He was so kind and attentive towards me, towards all of us. He took us to houses behind the owners’ backs: he had papers fixed in order for these houses to be considered listed and in need of restoration. There is a widespread effort in Turkey in order for these buildings to be spared in the face of the contemporary covetous construction sector.
I left Burdur to go to Fethiye – ex Makri – and then to Livisi and Kayakoy. Kaya means rock. The houses there were built on the one side of the rock in order for their inhabitants to be protected from pirate raids. That was where the Rum, the Greeks lived; craftsmen, pharmacists, doctors, merchants. In the meadow that engulfs the endless mountain range of Taurus was where the Turks, who were peasants and stock-farmers, lived. The Turks used to sell butter and milk to the Greeks and they lived in harmony with each other. One day the Greeks left. They cleaned their houses, washed their dishes and locked up behind them because they thought they were coming back. Others arrived in their place: strangers. The locals didn’t like that. They didn’t want to have much to do with the Muhacirs and marginalized them. And in turn, they didn’t live in the houses that had been emptied: they didn’t want to benefit from someone else’s tragedy; they felt it was a bad omen. Some of them did stay there but they always felt nostalgic for the city of Thessaloniki they had left behind.
Around ‘50-‘60, the then prime-minister said you can take anything you want from your houses and they started to strip them bare of their doors, windows and shutters. Some of them were used and some became firewood. Today the village, similarly to a ghost town, bravely faces each sunrise and sunset with its open windows, the gaps where the doors used to be, the non-existent roofs and its perforated ‘interiors’, as if its insides are on public display. And you‘re almost able to hear the whispers coming from the lovers’ beds, the laughter of children playing, the sound of cleaning up the dishes after lunch, tired bodies lying down in bed. All these sounds spread out and mingle with the morning mist which scatters in the sunlight. The morning mist is like a living body. Two people have said this to me, completely randomly and at different times.
I had no doubt about it.
Goodnight Apostolis.
Photini
Tuesday, 19th of April 2016
Photini
National matters that are essentially cultural, linguistic or matters of a superstructure, ex-pose a trace of difference. The harmonious cohabitation between Greeks and Turks that the Burdur local authority employee wished for is a naive yearning. There is no such thing as harmonious cohabitation; never, nowhere, for no reason. Each time there is only a luminal co-existence on the map of desire. Life itself does not co-exist faced with the insurmountable difference of its death. The things you identify in this trip and that you write to me about are essentially differences and nothing else. More importantly a difference which is inscribed upon place, within time, and which does not concern neither place nor time but language. A semantic displacement that exposes its difference to the historicity of its environment: from the displacement of the expatriated populations to the relief of the abandoned buildings to be taken over by the Muhacirs. A language within another language. An appropriation of the other. The difference yields plasticity, formal diversity, records It, the unfair dialectic of its shape; and it does so not necessarily in a contentious manner. Difference does not carve out borders, it doesn’t put up fences and it doesn’t set up wars, but it yields the internality of the border, it corroborates it. The clarity of this form can be considered in the field of love where the trace of the other becomes the signal of my desire and at the same time, the cause of my downfall. This, which is in that way or the other, and which is always the Other.
Apostolis
Tuesday, 10th of May 2016
Good afternoon Apostolis
The night I left Ankara to fly to Athens, with a nocturnal layover and a 5-hour transit at Izmir airport, I kept hovering over the amalgamation of sleeplessness and the nostalgia that was already setting in, like I didn’t want to let go of that place. My head was clouded; I kept forgetting things here and there while I was looking for something else. It was a slow, rather clumsy ritual, but it also felt like an easy transition, like when you leave a place that you are going to return to. I arrived in Athens at dawn and despite the fact I hadn’t slept at all I took out all the photographs and laid them on my mother’s table. I told her the whole story of my trip picking up each piece of the puzzle, one by one. The house on the right, the one belonging to the ill woman, seemed more familiar to her also due to its abandonment: the images of the house on the left, the colorful carpet, the plastic flowers and the pastel painted rooms were unnaturally unfamiliar despite the house being well-kept and alive. Whenever I refer to the house and to the experience of the trip, the image of the woman from the ancestral home on the right side always returns to my mind. In this mapping out of the trace and the relationships between possibilities and other ingredients of her fate, this woman personifies this ill condition. Her memory is a metaphor of the violence inflicted upon every single person, every family that was uprooted, sent away from the place where they were born and with which they had developed strong ties under circumstances that were often inhumane. In this ‘return’ there is no other recognition than that of the fears, of the wound, of coming face-to-face with the Other in the mirror.
Tuesday, 10th of May 2016
Photini
Returns are impossible – same as nostalgia.
I like the thing that you mention about the mapping of the trace. I am under the impression that this is pretty much what we are also doing here, discussing your trip as it is actually taking place.
Mapping the trace means locating it on the map of things. But the trace cannot be located, the trace is. A black hole on the map of experience. And as we all know black holes emit only ghosts. Ghosts of language, events that abandon us even beyond language. So, the trace is a mirror of the Other, reflecting my own deficiencies, my own loss. The Other is always a matter of the self, a phantasmatography.
And on the other hand – but not elsewhere – we find the frightened face of that lady that marked your experience of that journey. A face that has an effect on us – I was also moved by that photograph of hers that the reader won’t be able to see – without necessarily having anything in common with it, something that would turn it into a familiar face. Nevertheless, it remains a face-event that shutters us. We cannot but respond to its silence, to its engulfed invisibility. It’s one of those faces that usually move us precisely because of their unavailability. They have an effect on us by not touching us. They are characterized by an archetypal grief, a tragic dimension that makes us vulnerable. On their skin they bear the marks of a secret unspoken experience of ours, an unconscious – although perhaps in your case less so – loss. They bind us to a promise that cannot be other than the promise of death: an experience to which we are all vulnerable. We come from this place of death and throughout our lives we do nothing else but feel nostalgic for its loss, tracing our lives, letting go of it, offering it up every day to its death. Our life is a memory not of our own but one that belongs to others. What is ours is only this indomitable experience of death.
I’m glad our discussion comes to an end in such a hopeful tone.
Warm regards
Apostolis
translation: Irini Bachlitzanaki
'Mapping a Trace' is now translated in english, with the kind support of Tandem Turkey 2015-6.
“TANDEM – Cultural Managers Exchange Turkey-EU is an initiative of the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), MitOst (Berlin), Anadolu Kültür (Istanbul), and supported by Stiftung Mercator (Essen).”