an elegy for printed matter

It is a short essay by Walter Benjamin, written in 1931 while moving to a new place apparently soon after his divorce. (1) I dare not share the same title for this piece, but recently I carried my books from one apartment in İzmir to another and (re)experienced their covers, weight, smell and the apparent order of date and place of purchase, as they altogether came off the shelves after almost sixteen years.  Benjamin was the collector of antiquarian and rare books and special editions as he handsomely details in the essay. Now I realize that I, rather than having a collector’s zeal, ‘hoarded’ books and other printed matter in varied fields of interest that comprise a kind of (mental) autobiography as befits an artist and a university lecturer. Intellectualism deforms one’s will towards believing in an unattainable goal, for which the supreme end is the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.  (News came out in 1990’s that the Library started digitizing its (then) collection of close to a hundred and sixty million books and documents) No wonder Jorge Luis Borges, the librarian of Buenos Aires, is one of the stronger entries in my modest library. And still, the ‘cloud’ (the digital ether) is no match for the real thing, one wants to believe.

I assume that for a writer of fiction, the craft (and professionalism?) calls for a comparative reading  in genres and somehow shapes a good part of one’s collection of books. But then, any form of ‘creative writing’ as taught in schools calls for a wide scope of bibliography. The ‘artistic research’ that I and my colleagues praise highly while producing work and writings requires referring to titles ranging from literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, science and politics to varied theory, as well as the in situ observation of people and phenomena. In this case, one’s own library is only as good as a limited source from which the list of cross-references and hyperlinks can be attained. I remember that a lot of the books I bought came out of the footnotes and references of the material I read while writing short essays for architecture and art magazines, which, obviously, leads to older literature that one thinks should be within reach all the time.  For anything newly published, periodic visits to good libraries, select bookstores and for a long time now, web searches are essential.  As artistic research have the tendency to drift all over the place in search of a creative synthesis of knowledge, or sometimes for a spontaneous invention, it is possible to assume that it is not taken much seriously by scholars in natural and social sciences. And certainly not by historians whose meticulous (and lifelong) study of books, chronicles and documents in their original language and print is the direct antithesis of the ‘surfacing’ of history and other subjects by a contemporary artist. For them, my library is mostly about ‘leisure reading,’ part of which is made up of Ph.D. dissertations re-edited for general public and circulated by American and British university publishers.

As I go through the books, I realize how my priorities and curiosity have drifted over time. From the time I could afford to buy books towards the end of undergraduate years (mid-1980s) my interests focused around art and photography, rather than architecture that I was studying. John Berger, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin were of prime interest as they later filled up their own shelves with books of essays, novels, poetry and collected writings. Accompanying these were monographs of photographers, mostly American and some European, and their photo albums, and MoMA publications of legendary exhibitions, i.e. ones written by John Szarkowski. By the time I was studying photography in New York in the second half of 1980’s these books and others had become affordable through Strand bookstore on Lower Broadway, to which I have paid weekly visits. Later on, writing my PhD dissertation in Ankara on the uses of photography in modern-contemporary art, Michel Foucault’s theories of representation in Western-European (historical) context became essential reading, and I have almost his entire works in my library.  I was mesmerized by the way that Foucault worked as a historian of modernity and modern discourse(s) (The Archaeology of Knowledge: what a title for a book!) to bring up a critical view of the present western civilization through heterotopias, asylums, prisons and the plight of institutionalized subject. Deleuze was a later (and extended) addition. Together with (other) Frankfurt School  (Arendt and Adorno) they offered a widely expanded means for an intellectual imaginary for an artist, as opposed to the hard core Marxist and Neo-Marxist/materialist literature on capitalism. They paved the way for books by Hardt and Negri (Empire,  Multitude and Commonwealth) in understanding power and the subject in twenty first century. Books by Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard were other entries as the very early (and somehow visionary) critique of ‘extreme phenomena,’ and the evil they pinpointed had evolved into today’s highly discreet means of surveillance, exploitation and domination all along the web and social media, the mechanics of which far surpasses the speed of printed word on paper and somehow still escapes me. And for wars (Virilio), they had become remotely waged and controlled at the speed of light but the utter destruction of lives and livelihoods, for example genocide,  have not changed for hundred years, as reflected on Palestinian photographs, literature, poetry and film in Gaza.

During the ten years I lived in istanbul from mid 1990’s my library had seen its most prosperous period, thanks to the several (high quality and exclusively English) bookstores that I have routinely browsed.  Material (and left) history (i.e. Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm), many Edward Said titles,  and books ‘on’ writing history are among the stronger entries on the shelves from this time. The accumulation of capital and colonialism I thought as being essential in understanding today’s phenomena, also gave insights to see the roots of Turkish psyche and sentiment. Another field of interest from those times was the urban history of İstanbul, mainly of Byzantium, and in part Ottoman, a field bordering on archaeology. It always seemed to me, a newcomer, that the streets and the facades, and the legends, intrigue and the stories that they mostly hide are too much of a burden for an outsider, in the historical (Genovese) neighborhood (Galata) that I lived, and during the long walks I took while photographing ‘the city’ across the Golden Horn, Constantinople proper with seven hills like Rome, once the center of the world. Being a ‘flaneur’ was out of the question among the bleak remnants of empires, but the melancholia that the city induced had resonances in Benjamin, and in Orhan Pamuk’s memoirs. This setting in urban ruins, historical and contemporary, initiated much of the xurban_collective artwork we produced and showed in biennials, museums and galleries across İstanbul, in Europe and in United States around those times. My love affair with the city and its history fizzled out by the time İstanbul was becoming a hip destination for the expats, artists, musicians and a partying youth mostly from Europe, which lasted a few years until AKP dominated and shaped the megalopolis to its desires of oriental high kitsch, now topped with Dubai chocolate.  Likewise, certain libraries (of wealthy and devout Muslims) are stacked with (imitation) leather bound books of uniform size and color, gilded with (fake) gold lettering on their spine, very decorative, manifesting their authority and closely guarding their contents against outside influence.

The later episode in the short history of my library has seen the books I collected in İzmir and from other locations during trips. More than ten years ago I started making a book of photographs and essays titled The Atlas of Smyrna/İzmir, still remaining a self-published book in limited copies. (figsson.org/works) İzmir is my hometown which I left at the age of fifteen, and moved back to after thirty something years. The literature on its history and demographics began to come up early in 21st century and being limited in scope, I have acquired most of the titles. İzmir’s decline and provincialism started in 1922, after the catastrophic fire at the end of the Turkish-Greek war which devastated the major part of the city and saw the exodus of the Greek, Armenian and Levantene populations that made up its lively cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, all throughout history fire had been a catalyst for civilizational decline and an ensuing amnesia when libraries are concerned, from book burnings to the burning of the library of Alexandria. Pergamon is located around ninety kilometers north of Smyrna.

I must say that the ‘new acquisitions’ to my library declined in the past decade, and I have possibly downloaded and read far more books and articles on the computer screen rather than in print form, as I produced works for exhibitions and for figsson.org that necessitated readings on ecology and on the existential threat of climate catastrophe and extinction. One thinks that the humankind must reflect on these in deep contemplation, next to the ‘judgement day’ that may or may not come as told in scripture, and that philosophy should overwhelm theology. Much of this literature is relatively new, like by Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton and others, and they are harder to find in bookstores and libraries around. Some of the material to go along is on  archaeology, not of specific sites per se but on archaeology of deep history in tandem with anthropology, as the landscape and scenes constantly recall while living in Anatolia: Gaia meets prehistory.  As I read them I developed a tendency  to retrospectively consolidate the catastrophic deeds of our time as they dictate an intellectual’s discourse, from neoliberalism to emerging oligarchy and facets of fascism, racism and political Islam; to genocide, animal liberation, extinction and climate: in short, all being diametrically opposed to a socialist utopia, one wants to believe. All this apparently not-so-in-depth survey of diverse topics resemble the workings of decent journalism of the investigative kind as taught in good schools.  I realize that reading pieces of journalism (not the news-reportage kind) also shapes the structure of sentences one writes. But then, unlike in journalism, an artist has the liberty to conclude in political rhetoric and aphorisms.

There are a good deal of titles on other topics to be found on the shelves, from popular science to art theory and history, classical philosophy, archaeological guidebooks, city guides from around the world and to a few rare books of photographs from early Turkish Republic from 1930’s. There also sits a good number of books that were donated by friends, who never hesitated on ‘great gift ideas.’ Few books I have inherited from my late father, mostly classics superbly translated into Turkish in between 1940-50, and a few on Ottoman history, his favorite subject as an enthusiast (a lawyer.) Somehow, before he was sixty, he decided to donate almost all his books to a public library in Izmir, possibly in the hundreds. Me and my two older brothers grew up among books at home, but for them as kids (and not for me, somehow) the favorite pastime was reading hefty volumes of encyclopedias from cover to cover in 1960’s, around thirty five years before google search. I still keep some of them.  The popularity of encyclopedias in Turkey (Larousse, Brittanica, etc., translated into Turkish) saw its heyday during the time that they were given away by the newspapers after one collected hundreds of coupons printed on the front page every day. This was the case especially in the 1980s before the advent of multi-channel television, and all those massive volumes, brand new and unread, were later dumped and collected from the streets to be turned into pulp.

There are still a couple of important aspects to be addressed while unpacking my library. First, where does literature/fiction fit in this inventory? Unfortunately, world classics are missing in the curricula of education for an average Turkish adolescent. One has to go after them, and spend a considerable effort in life in order not to stay illiterate on a wide spectrum, from Sophocles to Shakespeare and to the nineteenth century novel. For me, the modern classics had been more approachable in the order of things to read; Italo Calvino, Paul Auster, Saint-Exupery, Georges Perec and Orhan Pamuk are represented with many books, and samples from modern novelists of twentieth century are present, and so are other Turkish writers. I sense that to me ‘the book as object’  still has the semi-sacred aura that possibly contradicts the western readers’ attitude towards paperbacks. The problem is, how does one prescribe himself  the  “1000 books to read before you die…” of the popular parlance? So little time, and little space left on the shelves. Every time I read the news on the shortlisted authors for ‘Booker’ or ‘Pulitzer,’ I feel that I have been somehow missing the real stories.  And secondly, ‘in extensio:’ Why are my books about eighty percent in English? Why read (even when good translations are available) and try to write in English mostly, far from my native Turkish in which I mainly crack my jokes? Am I a self-hating Turk, as in the Zionist take on the ‘self hating Jew’? Or a kind of colonial subject deprived of his roots? I very rarely dream, and only sometimes think in English, and when the time comes I curse and swear bilingually. And whatever I write in English requires editing by a ‘native speaker’ before being respectably published in print. It is a trap I fall into as I compare the mere 15 to 20-thousand-word Turkish dictionaries, to the average 50 thousand words in  Webster’s, or more in a decent sized Roget’s Thesaurus (even in college edition)  as though there are more sophisticated and nuanced ways of telling things. I will leave it at that, convincing myself that if I read in English then I write in the same language, and that possibly more people can read it. But deep down I sense that the really creative writing is done in the tongue that you hear from your mother.

In the well known essay titled “The Total Library,” (2) Borges muses on the theorem of ‘the infinite monkey’, that an ape (or many apes) sitting at a typewriter and randomly hitting the keys for unlimited time have the possibility to eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare (or all the books in the British Museum.) For more than one hundred years, variants of this theorem had been analyzed, tested and, more recently, simulated by using computer(s).  In 2024, it is finally refuted by mathematicians on the grounds that the probability of such an achievement to occur would take longer than the lifespan of our universe, whose ‘heat death’ is assumed to take place in around a ‘googol’ of years, that is 1 followed by one hundred zeros. (3) To the exact contrary, one thinks that for the artificial general intelligence to write all there is in a future total library is fast closing in on the probability of 1/1, in the mathematical limit that the value of a function approaches as the index (computational power-speed?) approaches some value. Indeed this is also pure speculation considering the physical limits (energy and resources needed that would bring an end not to the universe but to the earth as we know it.) More importantly, one wants to (impossibly) believe that the stories of the humankind, as told by humans in a cosmic dream, is more than the sum of its parts in atoms, bits, networks and algorithms.  Borges wrote the essay in 1939, a year before Walter Benjamin climbed up the Pyrenees (late September) fleeing Nazi occupied France to reach Spanish border (Port-Bou) only to be denied entry. The next day he committed suicide. The ordeal of this escape on foot was written down in 1980 by Lisa Fittko, his guide who accompanied him and two others. (4) Her emphasis is on the heavy black briefcase that Benjamin carried and guarded at all costs, apparently containing “… a manuscript  more important than I am” in his words. Years later, Lisa Fittko hears from Gershom Sholem, Benjamin’s closest friend, that “… there is no manuscript, until now nobody knew that such a manuscript ever existed.”  And no entity will ever write it down for us. Now there is a Walter Benjamin Library in Port-Bou, his resting place.

April 2025

1. Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Shocken Books, N.Y. 1969

2. Jorge Luis Borges. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Eliot Weinberger, ed.  Penguin Books, London 1999

3. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/01/infinite-monkey-theorem-keyboard-tyepwriter-shakespeare-study

4. Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Harvard Un. Press, Cambridge 1999

It is hard to find words facing the ongoing genocide in Gaza since October 2023. Tens of writers, scholars, journalists, historians and other enlightened people have written and talked extensively on the current massacre, its antecedents and background going back many years to 1948, the Nakba. Their testimony also mentions the complicity of the British Empire in the last half century of  the Ottoman rule and after the Great War. As far as I can follow, the most informed commentary comes from American intellectuals and investigative reporters, and from Palestinians in exile or still in the occupied territories, and from few Israelis still living in their own country.  These people are mostly drawing from the leftist point of view and they are in many instances Jewish. Their writings and interviews are mainly published through websites like Counterpunch, Scheerpost, ZNetwork and others, whose circulation (in the old parlance of publishing) may possibly be in the thousands only. In addition to these, DemocracyNow is especially commendable in bringing out the real faces of the tragedy by interviewing Palestinians of Gaza: Doctors, poets, writers and journalists. Some of them lost their lives since, and almost all lost relatives and loved ones. Not being able to follow other material from the continental European languages, I should expect to be lacking in some crucial commentary. But then, the worthwhile contribution to the critique (and condemnation) of an ongoing massacre one can expect to be translated into English and circulated on the web. In my opinion, mainstream media and newspapers in the western world can be excluded from this  list for various reasons. Even the ‘left-liberal’ ones, like The Guardian that I follow for news everyday fail to deliver an ethical and just account of the carnage: balanced journalism is not about pitting one’s grief to the other’s in consequent photographs on the main page, or distant-reporting on a ‘war’ as though there are two compatible sides, or relying mainly on the Israeli propaganda machine. Even a simple glitch in language is telling: This is not a war in Gaza, but a war on Gaza. Meanwhile, except for Al Jazeera, true journalism with witnesses on the ground has failed in this instance, following incredible number of casualties and deaths among the brave Palestinian reporters under Israeli fire.  As a lot of people agree, among wars of the past century this has been the deadliest assault  on a small territory in which no one is spared, including (and deliberately) the journalists.

My modest contribution to these can be told through my experience and reminiscences as an academic and an artist living in Turkey. It is by no means a kind investigative research, but what I have observed over the years in instances that relate to the struggle for Palestine as seen from the Turkish side.  This also should recount the official view as the political power in Turkey in the past fifty years has changed hands from center-left democrats, to semi-secular right wing  opportunists, and finally to a kind of  authoritarian political Islam. As a footnote: The policies that bind these political actors together are the denial of Armenian genocide and refusal to make peace with the Kurdish population of Turkey and its neighbors. In certain instances, this narration also includes episodes of utmost agony that the Jewish community in Turkey had faced in a number of deadly attacks in the past. I try to understand what a lot of scholars worldwide observe as extreme confusion in the employment of  the concept of antisemitism, and in labeling multiple facets of racism, including Islamic fundamentalism and Zionism. It should be clear for a socialist (or for that matter for any person of conscience) that worldwide any fascistic, or an authoritarian, or an apartheid government should be labeled as such and fought against regardless of the foundation myths and extenuating circumstances, period. At the same time to hold the populations responsible for voting and electing these governments and to discriminate along these lines is the worst mistake an intelligent person can make, as we have observed time and again in Turkey. Peoples of the third world had frequently been punished by their oppressors for democratically electing the wrong guys, as the people in Gaza know very well. This is the stuff of military coups and following atrocities in 1953 in Iran, in Chile and in other instances in south America, Africa and Asia

Most of Edward Said’s books have been translated into Turkish with considerable delay. In the 1990’s the first and the most influential one among scholars and social scientists was Orientalism. Unfortunately the first date of publication for most of his translated books are somewhat lost among the multiple publishing houses in Turkey that circulate data. As the original English version was first published in 1978, we can assume that part of the Turkish academia had picked it up early. The book is still influential in scope, not because Said mentions the Turks as an object of study for the field of Orientalism, but because the historical subjects of the Ottoman Empire were in the focus of the debate, and the literature of post-colonialism had some relevance in the developing Republic of Turkey. In 1990’s the Turkish academics in the cultural field, including myself, thought that the book answered some of the questions that we faced. For me they surfaced looking at photographs from 19th century Ottoman Istanbul. Somehow, representations of Islam was not among these questions. Meanwhile, Edward Said’s specific identity as a Palestinian public intellectual in exile and as the enlightened scholar of Palestinian struggle was a little lost. His later books came late into Turkish, like The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam and I suppose they had a lesser circulation. By this time, the left in Turkey was in disarray after the 1980 military coup, like in most other countries after the Berlin wall came down. And so was the solidarity of the global left with the Palestinian cause which by this time was picked up by the rising militant Islam.  I think it was in late 1960’s and 1970’s that a worldwide internationalism of socialists connected the struggles in the Middle East, South America, East Asia and Turkey. As an adolescent, I remember that there was a lot of debate on Palestine, and for the left militants PLO set an example for an armed national struggle. Meanwhile, the majority of the Turkish governments of the time, from social democrats to the right, and the combination of both in coalition, but always the enemy of socialists and communists in Turkey, had welcomed Arafat in many occasions. As far as I remember, PLO was the legitimate representative of the Palestinian cause, and Arafat its spokesperson both in Turkey and occasionally at the UN. And again as I recall, he never started his excited public speeches with (in) the name of Allah. For the official Turkish stand, the solidarity with Palestine was supposedly less about a brotherhood in Islam, but then it looked good during the elections among the pious voters. Later on in 1993 it was again Edward Said that harshly criticized PLO and Arafat’s concessions, their embrace by western media and centers of power, and their offsetting of the gains of the Intifada.

In late April in 1998 I was in the West Bank for around ten days as a photographer. I was commissioned by the Aga Khan Award for architecture to photograph in El Khalil (Hebron) and Nablus, both nominees for the award for the rehabilitation of the old town centers. Together with an architect-historian colleague who prepared the report for the jury, we stayed in East Jerusalem and were well received by a team of Palestinian architects and restoration experts. They were very proud of their achievement and hopeful for the recognition by a very prestigious institution. That year, Hebron had received the award in restoration. This very brief visit had left its impressions. It was a relatively quiet time in between two Intifadas and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, for which thousands of flags were visible everywhere. From my experiences in Turkey, I sense that the extreme visibility of the national flag in the public realm refers to both the degree of fervent nationalism and to a kind of emergency situation that requires vigilance, rather than being a symbol of simple patriotism. For Israel, this was possibly understandable. In my country one should beware. Unlike Jerusalem old city, on the street level in Hebron and Nablus there was not the presence of Israeli soldiers on patrol, and the tensions this aroused. But once I was on the rooftops to photograph, I could see that a network of other rooftops were occupied by Israeli military, in clear view of each other, heavily armed and fortified. I remember being closely watched from a distance, together with my guide, a sensation that Palestinians faced in everyday life together with a number of settlements and checkpoints on the daily trips. The Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron was a forbidden zone, guarded by Israeli soldiers. This is where in 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an American-Jewish settler had murdered 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others. In the early 2000s, on the TV screen I have recognized exactly the same few buildings that I photographed in Nablus. They were turned into rubble and dust by the Israeli tanks and bulldozers in an occasional assault.

On the morning of November 15, 2003, a Saturday, I was at home in Istanbul, where I lived for ten years. My apartment was in Galata district, in the heart of the city about twenty meters distance from the Galata Tower, a Genovese landmark and tourist attraction that stood there since 1348. It was also about a hundred meters away from Neve Shalom synagogue, which is around the corner from the tower down on the busy main street. When I felt the huge explosion, the first thing that came to my mind was that an lpg tank had accidentally went off in one of the restaurants. I was too shaken to go out. In a few minutes, I understood that it was far more serious when the bodies were being carried in the arms of men down the street to the two nearby hospitals as I watched from my window. A couple of minutes later another bang was faintly heard coming from the other side of the city.  The car bombs that exploded in front of two synagogues (the other one in Şişli district) almost simultaneously have killed 29 people and wounded 600 others. All casualties were Turkish citizens, and most were people of Muslim faith going about their daily business as the stores and businesses were open. Less than a week later, two more car bombs went off one after the other, one in front of the British consulate and the other one near the HSBC Bank in Levent, again killing tens of people passing by and wounding hundreds. All attacks were carried out by al Qaida. The mass in Neve Shalom was mainly spared possibly by the help of  hidden fortified walls and a fake facade. What prompted these precautions was a prior atrocity that happened on another Saturday, September 6, 1986, when members of the Abu Nidal organization attacked the temple and killed 22 Jewish citizens of Turkey.

In 1986 I was studying in New York and all through those years Benjamin Netenyahu’s face was on prime time broadcast news every other day, interviewed by the anchors of  the three networks as the representative of Israel at the UN. It was the time of the first Intifada. By then this fast talking man was being primed for what he would become today.

A condemnation should go for any indiscriminate terror attack on a civilian population anywhere in the world, be it in Europe, in Turkey or in Palestine. This is almost tautological. A humanist take on the proposition should attribute a decent moral position to every obedient Muslim of conscience, to every other faith and all decent folk who do not follow a faith. But when it is uttered by the highest political authority, it rings hollow. This is not a problem of political speech writing. It is about the long term policies being followed and other public utterances (demagogy) to satisfy a certain publicum (and the mob) that lead to moral corruption and cracks through which these vile acts can flow. Through these cracks, hundreds of  Turkish people had been bombed and gunned to death and hundreds maimed for life in Ankara, in Suruç and in Istanbul in the last ten years, by the members of Isis and its Turkish affiliates. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in Turkey is not leading as precarious a life as the Armenian citizens of the country, even though they did not enjoy the best of times in the last one hundred years. But today when the highest authority in the country engages in something close to a hate speech against ‘Israel’ (a nondescript entity on the receiving end) some of his followers are ready to engage in racism of the vicious kind. In return, when an Israeli cabinet member labels all Palestinians as ‘human animals’ there are consequences all the worst for the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

On June 28, 2016 Isis militants carried out an attack in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport that killed 48 people and wounded 236. On October 28, 2023, the ruling party in Turkey (AKP) held the ‘Great Palestine Meeting’ in the currently dismantled airport’s runways. Thousands of people had to be bused to the relatively remote location: a party organization. As far as I have seen from photographs, among the thousands of national symbols waved in excitement, there was approximately one Palestinian flag for every one hundred Turkish flags. This was an AKP rally, an occasion for the president to publicly voice his rhetoric before the oncoming local elections. Meanwhile, it was all in the family, all acted for the national crowds.  

The fate of the people of Gaza and the West Bank has been sealed by the most toxic circumstances that the global world had seen for a very long time. On one hand, the claim on the Palestinian struggle by varied militants of Islam since 1990s left them facing the more murderous Zionist regime and the settlers as its paramilitary wing. The violence spirals out of control and finally the apartheid government sets the conditions for revenge in each instance. But equally tragic is the fact that another toxic-macho combination of men rule the corrupt regimes that occupy and surround the Holy Land in concentric circles on the map, South Africa being an exception. They might have had some sincere empathy for Gazans (or might have had the power of sanctions) to alleviate the plight of Palestinian people, but they stayed put. These men range in a spectrum from members of the Palestinian Authority to the sheiks, owners of the oil wells (and countries) in the Gulf; and to the king (and his son) guilty of the most gruesome murder of a journalist, a citizen, inside a foreign mission (the body snatchers); to the new Persians, the clerics that accelerated the public hanging of the most joyful and innocent sons and daughters of Iran; the butchers of Damascus and Tahrir Square; and gradually to other men of  (some) power.  Enter the European countries and the United States in this act of the tragedy. Few people in a sane mind expect that through the ‘corridors of power’ and ‘the delicate balance of trade and supply chains’ or through the fog of history or simply through the long term allegiences and support for Israel, that neat distinctions could be made by men in power along the following lines: What is Antisemitism? What is racism? Holocaust denial? White supremacy? Apartheid regime? Annihilation? Genocide? These distinctions are being made with a clear conscience and mind by the majority of peoples of the world, and acted upon by gathering on the streets in Europe, United States and to a lesser degree elsewhere, demanding first a ceasefire, then dignity and a decent existence for the Palestinian people. Facing the innocents of Gaza covered in blood, our only hope lies in the decency and the power of this multitude.

February 2024

In early 2024 I have stayed a relatively longer time in Chicago since many months and years I have spent in the United states in the past: close to five years that I had been in New York in the second half of 1980’s and several months in late 90’s in California. In between there were several shorter visits to New York, Vermont and to Chicago. In all these years, my impression of the country and its people came and went in cycles of recollection and amnesia. Every time I come back I recognize that certain things and places do not change much, including details and routines that regulate everyday life. This is rather comforting for someone coming from Turkey where the pace (and in a sense, violence) of change (in the cities, streets, architecture, in countryside, and certainly in attitudes) is immense. My country is the site of continuous destruction and re-construction on a land with many thousands of years of history. The debris that this leaves behind is not only of anything that has historical value, but in a sense it is also of the remains of human lives and of the entire biosphere. I am not suggesting that everything stays the same in this part of the world in urban America, but that change comes gradually in the physical realm that people can accomodate with some memories intact.

One thing that changed gradually is the face (or the interface) of the corporate USA in the cities. What fascinated me as a young man coming fresh out of architectural school was the Manhattan skyline, first faintly visible in the distance when coming in from JFK airport, later imposed in all its might from Brooklyn. After almost forty years, I still remember the awe that I felt in this first encounter. As a student of photography in New York, I was attracted to its architecture, and I made most of the photographs and graduate work in downtown Manhattan. In fact, in a significant part, the history of the art of photography is closely intertwined with the history of urban architecture in America, roughly up until 1970s. And not so much with Chicago (except for Harry Callahan and possibly others) but with New York. Those photographers were my heroes. Meanwhile, for a few years, I remember spending time in Midtown Manhattan and Central Park over the weekends, possibly lured by the crowds of tourists and locals, and free access to MoMA, by then lacking its own glass tower. It took a while to understand that the variants of the international style skyscrapers, rather than being the interface through which you interact with some content, are opaque facades unless you are spending your working hours inside one. They form the décor for enthusiastic tourists and their selfies and for the urban shopping experience. Trump was already present. For now, these buldings represent other things rather than the power of the biggest corporations: offices, luxury residences and ‘retail space’, their names switching from Sears to Willis. The business of banking and finance is fluid enough to fit in any space, then and now. On the other hand, the ebb and flow of corporate presence in the cities were taking place even then as manufacturing moved overseas, culminating in the ‘campuses’ around Palo Alto and Cupertino and thereabouts which are infinitely more opaque in their inner workings. Today, in the time of distant working and precarious jobs, the true architectural representation of late capitalism are the interiors of Amazon fulfillment centers out there somewhere, and the large google sign on the lawn in Silicon Valley headquarters, a drive-thru selfie point and a backdrop for TV news on tech companies.

As in evolutionary biology, the (first) Chicago School of Architecture represents the link in between Paris, ‘The Capital of Nineteenth Century’ and Mies van der Rohe of Illinois Institute of Technology, as form followed function. More than a case of adaptation, this presented a kind of mutation, later to shape American cities like nowhere else in the world. From the architecture education in Ankara, what got stuck to my mind were black and white photographs (lecture slides reproduced from books) of Chicago buildings, very neatly photographed by professionals using view cameras, large format, perspective correction and all. As a chapter in architecture history it must have lasted several weeks articulated by very knowledgeable professors. And the names also stuck: Le Baron Jenney, Burnham and Root, Adler and Sullivan, and young Frank Lloyd Wright, together with buildings, like Carson Pirie Scott, Reliance, Marshall Field and Co., Marquette, Robie House and others. Other bits of this brief academic survey that remained with me involves legendary innovations in building technology that later enabled the skyscrapers, which co-existed with the daring use of older techniques: that the tallest building in masonry (Monadnock) had walls thicker than 1.5 meters on the ground floor, tapering off towards the top floors. For us in the early 1980’s, the latest chapter in history of architecture in lecture form ended with examples as I selectively remember now: Seagram Building in New York City, late Corbusier and Louis Kahn, Sears Tower, Robert Venturi’s house for his mother, and the last, AT&T building in Manhattan which represented a transition into something new that fortunately lasted only a decade or so. It took a relatively short time for the pastiche employed by Post Modernism in architecture to fade into oblivion, leaving few (and mostly regrettable) traces in American cities, including in Chicago as I realize now. The marriage of the high rise glass facade and the pseudo-historical form in 1980s and 90s was a disaster. This does not mean that the examples from the last twenty or so years of steel, concrete and glass skyscrapers are all better. The computer generated (and enabled) design, convoluted forms, deviations on the plumb line and individually produced facade and structural elements do not always yield better results. And rather than in the American cities, the worst examples of this escape from the boredom of the glass box are to be found in the Gulf states and in fact in Istanbul. When the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire meets the floating global capital to be parked in real estate, another disaster strikes. Meanwhile, Trump’s name also glorifies Istanbul’s skyline, this time not with one but two leaning towers, the siamese twins.

I had briefly worked as an architect-draftsman in New York and since 1990 had very limited contact with the profession, except occasional reviews of student work and lecturing on the very basics of art history. As an enthusiast, I try to follow what is new in debates on architectural practice. This opens a broader view that surpass matters of form, aesthetics and the star architect, and brings issues that are increasingly more recognized (in limited circles) which surface in examples of affordable housing, in the examples with the use of local materials and technology in the developing world, and in the examples that aim at a minimum carbon footprint both in construction and in use. Occasionally, these examples are circulated in architectural magazines and mainstream media, which appear a little like a lip service on major problems including inequality and the climate catastrophe. And today, they are also largely outside of the economy and the speculative value of land in the cities. Thus, one can think of the practice of architecture in the city to be largely knitted into the requirements of big money and wealthy clients, and the architects to be always suspect to selling out and comfortably residing together with the moneyed class when possible. Indeed, this negative view and  broad generalization does injustice to many practicing architects and it possibly applies to every other profession that requires a ‘professional degree’ from an institute of higher education. But for me, one of the reasons that lures a young person into architectural school is the promise of a creative job with the possibilities of becoming a creative semi-free spirit, just short of being an artist. It took a while to understand that the architectural education is also specifically good in educating one’s ‘taste’, bringing in topics from the periphery to boost it. Business can go along with this. That is why the architect drop-outs, for example in Turkey, make good galerists, restaurateurs with taste, impresarios of cutting edge night clubs, and run fashion design stores. Some become artists and musicians.

So, as architecture is always context bound, I am trying to find my way in the South Loop in Chicago admiring the legendary buildings that I saw in slides. For now, I am hoping to be more informed in the historical context that made them possible. Should I think that more than one hundred years is enough to negate this chapter in the history of capitalism in America as part of the context? Maybe. The buildings are there on their own for a long time like individual characters, co-existing with later additions up to this time. Seemingly, new materials, steel skeletons and other the structural innovations in building design form one of the strongest component of the context. But for me the most revealing are the transformations that can be observed on the facades, from Gothic influences to other historical references in ornamentation and towards less and less ornamentation and finally to a whole new interpretation of proportions, windows and tectonics in architecture. Started by architects with École des Beaux-Arts education in nineteenth century, Chicago today presents the most concentrated lesson in the history of urban architecture of roughly 150 years, ready to reveal the evolution of structures and forms from one building to the next.  I am still inspired.

January 2024

Cem Hepdeniz’i 29 eylül 2023 günü nasıl olduğu anlaşılamayan bir motosiklet kazasında kaybettik. 56 yaşındaydı. Neredeyse 1980 yılından beri çektiğim bütün fotoğraflarını gözden geçirdim, kendisini ele veren az şeye rastladım. 80’lerin başında, annesinin ölümünden bir iki yıl önce muzipçe gülen yüzü tam da Cem’e uyuyor. 14-15 yaşlarında olmalı.

Diğer fotoğrafların çoğunda kendinden fazla emin tavrı naif kişiliğini pek de yansıtmıyor. Kendinden emin olması herhalde anlaşılabilir bir durum, zira kafasına koyduğunu büyük maharetle yapabilen biriydi: Tam anlamıyla kendini varetmiş bir otodidakt. Ölümünden birkaç ay önce uzaktan girdiği bir sınav ile ortaokul diploması almış olması benim için de bir başarı oldu. Zira vaktiyle bu ele avuca sığmaz çocuğun özellikle matematik dersinden geçebilmesi için ben de çok çaba sarfettiydim, ama aklı başka yerlerdeydi.

Çocukluğumuza ait anılar bölük pörçük, aramızdaki yaş farkı 1975 yılında İzmir’den ayrılana kadar tanıdığım haşarı bir çocuğun maharetleri dışında pek bir şeyi hatırlamamı mümkün kılmıyor. Cem’in askerden döndüğü 89 yılına dek biraz uzak kaldık, dünyanın farklı yerlerindeydik, haberleşme imkanları zayıftı. Ancak son otuz küsur yıllık muhabbetlerimizde çocukluğundan kalan olayları ve detayları anımsama konusundaki becerisi karşısında  hayretten hayrete sürükleniyordum. Sadece kendisi, annesi, kardeşi ve dayım ile ilgili değil, benim ve ağabeylerimin de içinde olduğu geniş aile çevresi, Karşıyaka’da çok yakın oturduğumuz ve neredeyse her gün görüştüğümüz teyze, teyze kızları, enişte ve diğer mahalle sakinleri ve onların çocukları, akranları ve arkadaşları hakkında anlattığı şeyler “acaba bir kısmını kendisi mi yazıyor?” dedirtiyordu. Birçok insan gibi anlatırken süslemeğe meyilli idi, geçmişten bahsederken gerçekliğin ve fantezinin sınırları adeta birbirine dolanıyordu. Sanki hatırladığı imgeleri kullanıp kendini tekrardan o geçmiş sahnenin içine koyuyor, oradan da ‘olması gerektiği gibi yaratıcı’ bir öykü çıkarıyordu. Bu arada öykünün mekanı pek de farketmiyor, insanlar Münih’te, İtalya’da, Yunanistan’da, Uzakdoğu’da Türkçe’yi anlayıp hep Türkçe cevap veriyorlardı. Kısacası kendini ortaya koyup mekanı, kişileri ve diyalogları dinleyenlerin hayal gücüne havale ediyordu.  Bu arada kendisi de naif bir kişilik olarak bu yarı-rüya alemini tekrardan yaşıyordu.

16 yaşında annesini kaybettikten sonra hayatını tek başına, tırmalayarak kazandı, kendini var etti, adam oldu. Babası ile yıldızı uzun süre barışmadı, yine de Demir Dayı’nın erken emekliliğinde, yaşlılığında ve son günlerinde en büyük destekçisi Cem idi. Cem’in son zamandaki sponsoru da kardeşi Kerem. Karşıyaka’da okul öncesinden başlayarak yelkenci oldu, okul, eğitim ve kitaplarla çok da fazla işi olmadı. Sanırım bu konuda da önündeki ilk örnek kendini çıraklıktan yetiştirmiş çok becerikli bir teknik adam, tornacı ve makine imalatçısı olan babası idi. Cem’in deniz üstündeki kariyeri sadece yelken ve seyir bilgilerinin bir hayli üzerinde, motor, tekne aksamı, tekne imalatı, elektronikler ve deniz üstündeki uygulamalı birçok beceriyi kapsıyordu.  Görünürde herhangi bir işin nasıl yapıldığını görerek edindiği nazari bilgi yoluyla beceremeyeceği hiçbir şey yoktu. Son beş altı yıl içinde bu gözü kara cesaret onu taşındığı Muğla’nın yayla köyünde kendi evini (herşeyi ile, tek başına), kendine ve kardeşine birer adet motor-karavan (yine herşeyi ile) ve başka çeşitli (ve karmaşık) işleri yapmaya muktedir kıldı.  Parayla da çok fazla bir işi yoktu, neredeyse çocukluğundan beri isteyebileceği, sanayi tipi dikiş makinesinden ahşap tornasına, gelişmiş bir drone’dan çapa makinelerine kadar bütün oyuncakları etrafına toplamıştı. Köpeği Yanni uzun süre onun yoldaşı oldu, bütün iş, gezi ve diğer planlara o da dahildi, yaklaşık iki yıl önce yaşlılık sonucu göçtüğünde kuzeni kedere ve hıçkırıklara boğmuştu.

Cem’in anlattıklarını dinledikçe önümüzdeki yirmi-otuz yılı dolduracak kadar plan ve projeyi hayal edebiliyordu insan. Bu yüzden de ölümü çok erken oldu. ‘Rönesans adamı’ deyimi bir klişe. Cem’in edindiği bilgelik, malzeme, alet, makina ve insan yetisinin uygun birleşimi ile yapılabilecek olan herşey üzerineydi. Yaratıcılık kısmı ise ‘tasarım’a ilişkin olan tarafta kendini gösteriyordu. Ondaki yaratıcılık daha çok mühendislere özgü, eldeki imkanlarla verili bir işin tamamlanabilmesi için çözüm üretmeye dayalıydı. Örneğin her türlü kaldıraç, palanga, vinç, halat, makara, zincir ve diğer aracılar vasıtası ile tek kişinin (çok) ağır ve hantal  şeyleri yerinden oynatması, kaldırması, yönlendirmesi ve olması gereken yere yerleştirmesi onun uzmanlık alanıydı. Aynı zamanda amatör telsizcilik (citizen’s band), yamaç paraşütü, snowboarding, arıcılık ve diğer birçok şey de elinden geçti. Bütün bunlara bakınca insanın aslında azimli bir meraklı/amatörü  gözünde canlandırması mümkün olabiliyor. Değil matematik, basit aritmetik bilgisini dahi es geçen, ticaretle işi olmayan Cem için, pek azını gerçekleştirebildiği onlarca ‘ticari’  projenin zaten bir getirisinin olmayacağı aşikar idi. Onun özellikle son yıllardaki meselesi maddi kazançtan çok gidişat üzerineydi: sabahtan itibaren günü bölen çalışma planları; yakın, orta ve uzak vadede bitirilecek işler; elleri ve bedeni ile çalışmanın getirdiği bir tefekkür, meditasyon hali. Başkasına kaptanlık yapmadan, işverensiz, mürettebatsız, gerilimsiz. Bir de yeni karavanı ve Derya ile dünyayı dolaşmak istiyordu. Olmadı. Kardeşimdi…

Küçük teknesini elden geçiriyordu, ismi Cool, lakabı ‘Bit’, 1974 model Jeanneau Sangria. 2006 yılında güney Fransa’da Bandol yakınlarında bulduğu hali ile…

Onu kaptanı olduğu şu 33 metrelik guletin arkasında çekerek Marmaris’e getirmişti. Gulet (Akhaneton) İstanbul Tuzla’da bir Fransız armatör için inşa edilirken Cem başındaydı. Bugün de onun sayesinde yüzüyor olabilir.

Denizden yaylaya, rakım 800 metre. 2019 yılında inşaat başlamıştı. Kabataslak önerdiğim ve ölçülendirdiğim ayaklar, kirişler, ahşap elemanlar üzerine Cem harekete geçti. Prefabrik iskelet hariç her şey kuzenin eseri: tesisat, elektrik, ısıtma, yalıtım, finishing, mobilya, marangozluk ve diğerleri. Bir dönüm arsaya biraz büyük gelen 70’lerden kalma International traktör Akhisar’dan transfer. Su, odun ve inşaat malzemesi taşımaya yarayan, arada vinç vazifesi gören, bazen de köyün işlerine bakan traktör bir dönem Cem’in haso oyuncağı idi. Onun üzerinde kendini hakiki çiftçi sanıyordu…