Charred
1. In 1994 émigré Russian artist duo Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid produced the first (U.S.A. version) of the “Most Wanted Painting,” a painter’s interpretation of a professional market research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in art in the USA.(1) Their first showing of the work was titled The People’s Choice. It was followed by more than a dozen Most Wanted Paintings for individual countries based on similar polls conducted professionally, comprised of around 30 questions and sampling hundreds of lay people in each country.(2) Among the questions are the favorite color, preferences for outdoor-indoor scenes, realistic or imaginary settings, preference for human figures (working, at leisure or posing) and others related with taste. With few exceptions, the paintings show striking similarities, for example the most wanted paintings of France, Turkey, Russia and some others are barely distinguishable from each other through details and overall tint of the these scenes of landscape , methodically referring to the percentage of favorite colors. Overwhelmingly, the favorite color is blue, the second one green and the setting is pastoral. Style: realistic, mostly leaving the option of a green forest-pasture along a blue lake or a seashore, under the mostly blue skies with some clouds. The extras, kids, or young people, tame animals, hints of farming and others show variations. The critical reviews of these works by Komar and Melamid mention artistic satire, postmodern parody, and some the mockery of the ‘Socialist Realism’ in USSR where the artists grew up. On the other hand then, as today, these paintings are as much about people’s choice as the workings of a marketing research for products in a capitalist economy, or of representative democracy indexed to opinion polls until the day the elections are held, politics being reduced to hollow rhetoric of select ‘issues’ by few select strongmen.
2. In June and July 2025, wildfires raged across Western Turkey, killing firefighters and workers, scorching thousands of hectares of pine forest, shrub and pasture. As in the previous years, the lack of adequate response by the government agencies enraged ordinary citizens, the insufficient firefighting planes, helicopters, equipment and crews being the talk of the day. Added to these are the varied rumors regarding the culprits, from privatized power companies and the power grid and the lines that they had to maintain, to arsonists clearing land for possession, to the barbecue parties. With somewhat smaller damage to buildings and property, the overall sentiment of the majority stands at a distanced but genuine sadness watching the scorched earth, in the loss of the ‘lungs’ of the country, with some hinting at the agony of perishing wild fauna and livestock, and very few to the draught and the catastrophe of the climate. Here is the context in which the harsh economic policies forced the majority of the population to turn into urban dwellers since the middle of the Twentieth century, to totally sever their agricultural roots and ties to the countryside. With each new generation in Turkey, the mental engagement with ‘nature’ and landscape is more skewed, the setting of leisure time warped, and so are the teachings of faith regarding all forms of life that God has created(!). Nothing signifies this better than the detritus left behind by the nuclear family equipped with a car, after every excursion ‘into the nature.’ Where per capita ‘green space’ (parks and recreation) in all the major cities is less than one square meter, one would rightly expect that any cluster of more than twenty not-for-profit trees together make up ‘the woods.’ For many, out of necessity, that is the setting for leisure time out in the open. And it also makes almost every odd fire a ‘forest fire.’
3. In the meantime, many trees in real forests, plants and the wild fauna in Turkey are indirectly and indiscriminately sacrificed to an ‘industrial fire’ (the third fire) by the government shaped by opportunism, neoliberalism and political Islam for a very long time. In late July 2025, just before the parliament went into the summer recess (at around midnight to cut off opposition) a law had been passed easing restrictions and extending the area of already operating open pit coal mines, downgrading the already lax restrictions on mining in general, proposing the ‘transfer’ of olive trees some hundred years old, or re-planting double the amount of trees felled: all scientifically preposterous when agriculture or ecosystems are concerned. Added to this is the re-location of nearby villages (and souls) where necessary. When flames are not visible, as in ‘internal combustion’ or as in power generation with coal, when ‘lithic landscapes’ of fossil fuels are burned, there appears to be a pretense of civilized conduct in comparison to wildfires burning out of control. In Turkey, no reliable statistics is available to compare the loss after a wildfire, to that after the destruction of forests and ecosystems due to all kinds mining, highway construction, bridges, stone and marble quarries, to cement production, to the sprawling domestic and industrial developments around the cities, where brick, cement and steel have already passed through the flames before use. A simple (and a little close-by) flight over Anatolia on Google Earth is quite revealing.
4. “… By cooking food we got small guts and big heads. By cooking landscapes we went to the top of the food chain. By cooking the planet we have become a geologic force.” writes Stephen J. Pyne in an illuminating book titled Fire: A Brief History.(3) It reads like the essential companion to deep history and archaeology, to the spread of agriculture, to the history of industrial revolution and highly ‘controlled combustion’ of fossil fuels itself as a geological force, the pyrocene. Fire, the earliest technological tool for humankind (which is the sole species to instigate it apart from the first fire of dry lightning and volcanoes) had been in use for tens of thousands years for hunting, agriculture and for sculpting landscapes from polar circle to equator to varied effects. Pyne explains the very intricate history of this second fire (anthropogenic) through portable ambers, fire sticks and flints, which always require the biota (fuel) on the surface of the earth, from trees and scrub to wild grass; to slash and burn agriculture; to good fires and bad ones and cyclical fire regimes of vast landscapes and boreal forests; from fuel loads to fire prone dwellings and cities; and to the aboriginal fires as opposed to the new fire regimes of European settler colonialism and imperial order. From ‘fire power’ in war to the hearth at home, it appears that the second fire was integrated to the green (and deep) history of the planet, for better or worse, when the ‘sinks’ for its byproducts appeared to cope.
5. “… Electricity has erected a firewall between source and sink greater than any masonry bulkhead. Fire exists covertly in its products rather than overtly by its active presence. It flourishes subliminally in the cement, brick, tile, glass, silicon wafers, metal, incandescent lights, refrigerators, heat pumps…” (4) Wildfires and floods scattered around the globe have been the indicators of climate catastrophe for a long time now. Today, in a symbiotic relation, fire and water drive the Artificial Intelligence revolution to come (“… even greater than the industrial revolution!”) and other green technologies that we were promised. From the USA to South America, Europe, India and China, scarce (potable) water supplies, a commons, are fast depleted to cool off AI data centers and server farms that also consume huge amounts of energy, supplied by power plants that in turn have to be cooled along the river. The trap that the humankind had set for itself is still functioning at the edge of possibility for uncontrolled fire, to reduce heat and to avoid the whole system to be cooked and the big data to evaporate, while still running on burning fossil fuels. Such an impasse begets the snake oil salesmen to convince the powerful on a bright future. It is also the sign of broken democracies with huge income inequality, in a consensus reached among the crooked political elite and likewise insatiable oligarchs.
6. While reading on ecology, deep history and archaeology, fire in different guises is added as an extra layer of entanglement into the ‘The Ecological Thought’, following Timothy Morton’s book. I suppose this is also in line with letting go of ‘…’Nature’ as a reified thing in the distance, under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild…’ (5) While taking photographs and video after the fires, I came upon one of the two cemeteries for plague victims of 1826-1833 around Seferihisar, close to İzmir. The record has it that several villages and towns fell to the ‘Black Death’ around the area, which decimated entire populations.(6) The (memorial) stones, archaic markers, turned black, while the burnt (dead and standing) trees simply changed color as in a strange photographic process, like responding to some invisible side of the electromagnetic spectrum under the intense daylight of summer. The ants were at work merely a week or ten days after the fire passed through, together with the lizards: it appears that any body below ground had some chance, and that the birds will arrive in near future. Green sprouts of maquis were visible even before the rains came…
August 2025
(1) https://awp.diaart.org/km/painting.html
(2) https://awp.diaart.org/km/surveyresults.html
(3) Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History. Un. of Washington Press, Seattle 2019. p.26. (https://www.aws.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2020/07/FirePyne_ReadingCopy.pdf)
(4) Pyne, ibid, p.128
(5) Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought. Harvard Un. Press, Cambridge 2010. p. 5
(6) https://kulturenvanteri.com/yer/seferihisar-veba-mezarligi-i/#17.1/38.155815/26.857788