Once again a kind of desperation sets in. I was in istanbul when the 1999 earthquake happened close to the city. I remember being paralyzed and unable to connect to the civil networks organizing help, when the Turkish state itself was in total disarray and mostly dysfunctional in the first few crucial days of the catastrophe. Something similar happens today, this time the one man regime of AKP is trying to save face and keep an appearance of being in control of rescue and help, while keeping citizens’ solidarity efforts at bay and under pressure. By declaring the state of emergency, the man and his cohorts are aiming at the possible gains from photo-ops around the sites of a huge catastrophe and try to salvage benefits from the little remaining faithful voters before elections, while criminalizing social networks and other channels of organizing and dissent. The regime’s evolution into a full fascist force is complete. And even where it is most effective with 90.000 mosques in Turkey and hundreds of thousands of imams  graduated from state schools, the quick burials and mourning are in private. Luckily, its wars abroad, its xenophobic and threathful discourse towards Turkey’s neighbors and other parties from the western world is heavily tarnished and, for now, muted in the face of help coming in from all over the world.

In 1999, we traveled to the sites of destruction in Izmit and Sakarya with a colleague, after a few days, to see for ourselves and to take photographs. That was the first of our collaborations, later to evolve into xurban_collective art initiative. The experience was the source of the theme of ‘catastrophe’ to shape a number of works we have produced together. For us, the term stood for an existential condition of the the whole country and the Turkish state, and later to be applied to all ruins, soft and hard, in the wake of the neoliberal order. I realize how the concept that captivated us loosely applies to roughly everything we looked with a critical eye and how it somewhat flounders in its own capacity. In the case of earthquakes, what turns a natural disaster into a catastrophe is the human agency, aided and promoted by the concessions of the corrupt state, local governments, shoddy construction, greedy contractors and down to ignorant landowners: a chain that was never under the spell of scientific rationale. This is not new and had been frequently mentioned after all the loss, time and again, today as well. For us, I guess we were trying to make sense of this kind of annihilation in a historical continuum related to this part of the world, an extension of the 20th century with the Armenian genocide, expulsion of the Greek population of Anatolia and prosecution of non-muslim citizens of the Turkish republic, the military coups and their aftermath, the purge of socialist left, the suppression of the Kurdish revolt and the human cost of this civil war. The Turkish military-police state as it was in 20th century has today added the the capacities of neoliberal authoritarianism with an islamist cloak, and the ruins are extended to the hills and the plains in the form of quarries, mines, nuclear reactors and other installations, threatening the livelihood of all beings. What I understood reading Walter Benjamin was possibly a blurred sense of memory, of Messianic time and of a catastrophe piling up ruins. In Turkey, we were already living among the ruins, from prehistory up to the present: The pieces of the frieze lay next to the dismembered Ionic columns, a sign of the distant earthquakes. Meanwhile, metaphorically speaking, Benjamin himself was under the rubble when he wrote, German fascism was ascending and Europe was on the verge of catastrophe.

In late 1999 I wrote a short piece for an architecture magazine, and published together with photographs I took from various cities where the earthquake hit. I tried to make sense of what happened in a haphazard way, comparing it to a state of war which I have never experienced and to a kind of nightmare which I have experienced repeated times for a year after the event. This was an outsider’s account, at least of someone who survived physically unhurt, writing from a safe place, but trying to empatize with fellow humans who suffered. The other venue to explain and show what had happened to the masses and to the victims and survivors were several TV channels, both private ones and the official TRT which I had briefly mentioned in the piece.  They were all engaged in what I would call the pornography of disaster. Today, the number of television channels have been multiplied and divided along the lines as the propagandists of AKP and those of opposition, but the pornographic approach has not changed. Their mode of operation involves setting up tents for multiple camera crews and the correspondents in front of few of the thousands of sites of wreckage where the rescue operations continue. In live coverage, the studios in Istanbul surf from one site to the next, talk to survivors and relatives waiting for a good news from the wreckage of the apartments, and then cut to ‘officials’ and talking heads whose utterances are as useful as anybody’s. Television agitates the situation, arouses sentiments and tears, and no one thinks that the commercial breaks add insult to the injury while millions of viewers are transfixed in their living rooms. I think this contrarily induces voyeurism, and blocks comprehension of the magnitude of disaster and the contemplation of grief. So, one might think, how else journalism can be conducted in the face of a disaster as such? What to look for? What to show?

Yesterday Orhan Pamuk published a piece in New York Times titled “A Girl Trapped Under Fallen Concrete. A Man Unsure of What to Do.” (*)  “… Many people have posted these images of grotesque horror on social media without so much as a comment, a caption or even a few words to accompany them. In doing so, they are sending two messages. The first is the thing made manifest in their shock: the stunning, staggering scale of the catastrophe. The second is the feeling of abandonment and despair, felt by the whole country and as harrowing as the earthquake itself…” he wrote, after following the social media posts of the victims. In 1999 the survivors of the earthquake set up TV sets next to their tents, to see what had happened to them in real time. It was as though a third party had to relay their own desperation for it to be real. It was also to acknowledge that the world knew of their plight. Today, the survivors are directly connected to an effective but diffuse network of communication as the source of news, which the regime wants to suppress.  

The deep fissure in between a sensible approach and the practices of journalism appear to be unbridgeable. In such magnitude of disaster, still, I think, decent reporting is done in close-up. After everything the drone cameras had shown, after the before-after comparison images and  panning cameras on the street had explained what had happened, the wide view had to stop and the TV correspondents and agitators shut up before being repulsive. Few responsible reporters and observers in the field are bringing out individual stories without intruding and exploiting grief,  writing on the extraordinary efforts of relief by many organized groups, talking to individual responders, doctors, nurses and other professionals. It is as if one has to make one’s self invisible and walk on his/her toes in order to respect and report, notify on the urgent needs observed in situ especially after the initial days of frantic search. I guess for now the incomprehensible impact of the catastrophe is hung in the huge void in between what the mainstream media think people should see and the grief on the site, or in between convoys of luxury cars that transfer the president through quake stricken cities and the rising anger, and in between hallow discourse and strife  organized around political parties and the incredible solidarity of humans on the ground. For my country, hope is tied to the collapse of this gap.

February 2023

(*) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/turkey-earthquake-orhan-pamuk.html