Underground settlements open up in my works as a knife blow that severs the worldly, and as a community that lives, untimely and uncannily, in shelters and caves. This is an odd community of those that are often excluded from institutions, states, homes, and families.
Moving along the borders of mind, these figures continuously attack those borders. They challenge identities ascribed to them, and are indecisive about new ones. In many of my video projects, caves and shelters are used as temporary sites for all these contestations. These caves, which have their own time and memory, have become shelters for girls that are forgotten on the fields or where “dirty jobs” of history are staged.
In Orta Hisar, Hüseyin Galip Efendi Library has encountered me as a place which Freud describes as “not knowing what I know”, and which I fail to comprehend, but has followed me for years. While beauty and mystery of the encounter have drawn me in, its physical presence has terrified me. The underground cave that I have constructed as the hidden memory of earth has now stood before me. I have been mesmerized by it, but I have failed to see in the way I have envisioned it. As if this cave-library was born out of my imagination, first embodied in darkness, then ripped off from me, and found a solid place on earth. I have proposed to pull it back to the sphere of my imagination in order to re-form it.
I have carefully examined all traces that time has left on the body of the cave, and decided to insert notebooks within them. These notebooks have situated themselves somewhere between presence and absence, us and the reading activity.
Our incapacities to see the memory in its entirety has directed me to a word-line installation among windblown pages of a notebook. Notebook, while on the one hand spatializes itself, also becomes integrated with the actual space. And it has to find its own voice…
While time that shapes the cave and wind that moves the book are co-original, fragments of memory mix with voices as broken lines.
If the same wind haunts you, you need to give an eye and ear to the cave.
İnci Eviner