Faraway, So Close
The images coming out of Ukraine lay bare the destruction of lives, splintered into thousand pieces. In the cities and the countryside, the buildings, gardens, streets, bridges, farms and the fields are exposed as the scene of ruins. The photographs of the killed and the maimed, the funerals, the soldiers in the basement of the steel factory, children and mothers on trains and buses, and the subway shelters were the most visible. Heavier the bombing, longer the distance it exerts on the mass exodus of people, and deeper the wounds on the ones that stayed behind, willingly or not. The barbarism of the assault on the bodies shakes our flimsy faith for the future of humanity. Unbearable as they are, the photographs also reveal the most intimate scenes of the interiors: a sofa covered with debris, the missing wall where light enters with such intensity that the room had never experienced before, objects strewn around, pictures, wallpapers, pots and pans expose the modest lives lived. Here and there one sees a resident trying to pick up the pieces from the carnage left behind.
Almost nobody was able to record the atrocities of ISIS, save for the oral testimonies of victims. Meanwhile, in comparison to Ukraine, the Syrian regime’s barrel bombs that rained on İdlib, Aleppo and other cities yield images of rubble of apartment buildings in close quarters, in monochrome. The white helmets used to stand out in numbers on top of the piles to rescue lives, if it was possible at all, while the streets remained impassable. Sometimes on stretchers, but mostly on someone’s lap, the wounded children were carried away to a hospital, if it still functioned. The exposure that these images held on western media was far more scattered, as are the ones that come out of Gaza, periodically. They remind one of the photographs from Dresden, Hamburg or Berlin from the end of the second world war, always in black and white.
The 1999 earthquake close to İstanbul led to another display of horror. With close to 20.000 killed and thousands of buildings flattened, this was a lot more naked carnage that exposed the chains of corruption and the impotence of the Turkish state. In that, it was a totally different category of cataclysm, again much exploited in the mainstream (Turkish) media to the degree of a callous spectacle. Yet, it was still a time when people in Turkey were able to cooperate and grieve together.
In early 2000’s, as xurban_collective we were producing art projects that involved massive photographs of urban ruins. The ‘catastrophe’ as metaphor illuminated our critique of both the state and the neo-liberal regimes of power. The core argument came from Walter Benjamin’s theses on history and modernity, and his sense of impending doom in Europe just before the war. His writings were very visual and full of allegory, and melancholia was fit to make sense of things one sees around in an old city like İstanbul, as was in the work of Orhan Pamuk, with a specific Turkish idiom: ‘hüzün.’
It appears that ‘under the sign of Saturn’ it is possible to compile images of varied ruins in a bundle to signify monstrosity, vanity, mortality, etc. While the correspondents of war are in unique urgency to capture the ruined lives on peoples’ faces, the artist may be sifting through the crime scene postbellum, secure from imminent danger, open to poetic renderings as one sees fit. This core difference in between writing ‘a report’ and ‘an epilogue’ does not diminish either ones’ function or value, neither does the difference in between social or climate activism, and poetic gesture. But is it a fair game to slap ruins (of distant past, of industrial past, of war and disaster) and simple urban decay, degradation, dilapidation and dereliction together to make an allegorical point? Do images yield thousands of sentiments? After all, it all seems like a kind of voyeurism, whether inside a Çatalhöyük house, a Pompeian Villa, a wooden house in İstanbul, in an abandoned Detroit factory, or looking at the exposed interiors of a Kharkiv apartment. Mostly in imagination, one peers into the innards of past lives, to very distant past lives, to the human achievements and also barbarism, to possibly happier times and definitely into one’s own mortality, while being somewhat aloof. But even then, this act of imagination is the very antidote to the glitz of the cities and spaces of consumption, both real and virtual. Some of us are drawn to the urban detritus to search for a deep meaning, assuming that every bit conceals a past where stories of women and men were larger-than-life: possibly a fallacy, as opposed to the phantasms of the flaneur.
Today, the ruins migrate from cities to the open, sometimes to remote landscapes, and the sheer majority of humankind are the ultimate voyeurs facing the plight of the biosphere. The engagements, ranging from the awe inspiring contemplation of natural scenery to scientific research on molecular biology are all prone to be deflected with disastrous consequences, as in the past, resulting in a war against planet earth. These ruins are visible in the form of open mines, stone quarries, fallen trees, oil wells, dams and other human interventions. What is less visible is the carbon content of the atmosphere, slightly acidic oceans, less ice inside the polar circle and the sixth extinction of species, etc. What we don’t see from afar annihilate beings. When we wander out there to the open, there are fewer signs and sounds, less companions. The war zone is immense…
June, 2022