Illumination #6 - In search of lost time
These past few weeks I have been researching about the art of
wandering the city and its evocative spaces -various theories and concepts (the Flaneur, the Derive, psychogeography, the poetics of space, metaphysical art)
and artists/writers like De Chirico and Bachelard whose work has resonated with me. My concern now is how to relate what I have researched
to my specific interests within Istanbul and the greater MENA and Mediterranean region.
Over the weekend I attended the “Universe Flickers” exhibit at
SALT Beyoglu. The work which struck me the most was of the Cairo-born Armenian
artist Anna Boghiguian. While her sketches and painting installations are quite different
from my current medium of photography, (and her interest seems to lie more
within exploring the violence of history, wars, revolutions and the roots of
modern imperialism through a personal lens) Boghiguian considers herself a ‘nomadic
artist’ (having lived in Canada, India, Egypt and other places) and maps the world
through her drawings and diaries, and has been described as “at home and in
exile everywhere”. I was born in Canada to parents of mixed ancestry, but have always felt at home (and in some off form of exile) within the general Eastern Mediterranean - my Grandfather immigrating from Southern Italy is my only real explanation for this, (as well as a Maltese Great grandmother and negligible 8% "Middle East" DNA according to Ancestry.com.) My mom came to Canada on a boat from Germany in 1955. I was conceived in Morocco but born in Canada. I have always perpetually felt I belonged elsewhere and have followed that intuition wherever it led me, though I cannot fully make sense of it.
elsewhere (not comparable)
- In or at some other place or places; away. quotations ▼
- These particular trees are not to be found elsewhere.
- To some other place.
- If you won’t serve us, we’ll go elsewhere.
This word exile is of great interest
to me:
To be in exile means to be away from one's home, while either being explicitly refused permission to return or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return. It can be a form of punishment and solitude. Wikipedia
Rimbaud wrote of the ‘Robinsonner’ as the ‘mental traveler’, leading a marginal Flaneur existence of self imposed exile, traveling and moving further and further from his place of origin. Rimbaud himself ended up in Ethiopia, abandoning his homeland of France to become a self exiled arms dealer in Harar. I have long been fascinated by people who have chosen a life like this – after 5 years away from my country of origin it appears in this fascination I have become one of them. This concept has also been an inspiration to many others - Poe’s “Man of the crowd” is the detached voyeur with a camera, but one whose boundaries between reality and imagination are becoming increasingly muddy. I am intrigued by this blurring of reality and fiction, in the mind of those in exile.
To be in exile means to be away from one's home, while either being explicitly refused permission to return or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return. It can be a form of punishment and solitude. Wikipedia
Rimbaud wrote of the ‘Robinsonner’ as the ‘mental traveler’, leading a marginal Flaneur existence of self imposed exile, traveling and moving further and further from his place of origin. Rimbaud himself ended up in Ethiopia, abandoning his homeland of France to become a self exiled arms dealer in Harar. I have long been fascinated by people who have chosen a life like this – after 5 years away from my country of origin it appears in this fascination I have become one of them. This concept has also been an inspiration to many others - Poe’s “Man of the crowd” is the detached voyeur with a camera, but one whose boundaries between reality and imagination are becoming increasingly muddy. I am intrigued by this blurring of reality and fiction, in the mind of those in exile.
Creativity and exile have long been suggested to go hand in hand –
by being displaced for whatever reason, one has to rely on their imagination to fill in the gaps,
to create a sense of home, to maintain ones sanity, to express oneself when homesickness and isolation kick in.
İt isn't just about “traveling to seek inspiration” – creativity itself becomes a source of
stability and reassurance and a way of making sense of ones often confusing or hostile surroundings. The exiled person is paradoxically free – to recreate
themselves and the world around them.
French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote of metaphysics and memory
that the purpose of knowledge was to “know things deeply, to touch the inner
essence of things via a form of empathy”. Bergson believed the source of creativity,
imagination and spirituality ( as reflected in the arts, poetry, music and mysticism)
to be intuition not intellect. In his book “creative evolution” he
suggests that the experience of time as a duration can best be understood through
this intuition, and the personal subjective direct experience is more important
than rational objective time.
Direct experience or immediate experience generally denotes experience gained through immediate sense perception. Many philosophical systems hold that knowledge or skills gained through direct
experience cannot be fully put into words.
"Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same. Hence Bergson decided to explore the inner life of man, which is a kind of duration, neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity.[1] Duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. It can only be grasped through a simple intuition of the imagination"
"Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same. Hence Bergson decided to explore the inner life of man, which is a kind of duration, neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity.[1] Duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. It can only be grasped through a simple intuition of the imagination"
Which brings me back to my direct experience of Istanbul and its quiet, evocative, lesser known and somehow timeless empty public spaces. The soul of Istanbul has been said by some to be its crowds, its people, its movement and communal shared experience and chaos. But as an outsider and self-exiled person within that culture I have a different viewpoint. İn a way, by showing spaces and quiet still streets and personal reveries I am doing the opposite of the Orientalists who were tryıng to show something as they believed it should look, through pleasant and familiar "exotic" stereotypes. İ am trying to reflect the experience of being a female flaneur in self-imposed exile, observing my own perception of the deepest layers of a city that has for a variety of reasons, captured me for a duration of time.
Years ago I came across the concept of Huzun, the Turkish word for collective melancholy. My photography showing Istanbul's various crumbling and evocative spaces generally without people is a reflection of my own interpretation of this concept, and a personal reflection of my own sense of huzun as a foreigner living here for many years.
"Each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkei t of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun , a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, "a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress."
"A city one has lived in long enough shapes itself into one's own image, acquires the traits of one's personality, the features of one's soul. It becomes what Jorge Luis Borges once called "a map of my humiliations and failures".
Years ago I came across the concept of Huzun, the Turkish word for collective melancholy. My photography showing Istanbul's various crumbling and evocative spaces generally without people is a reflection of my own interpretation of this concept, and a personal reflection of my own sense of huzun as a foreigner living here for many years.
"Each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkei t of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun , a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, "a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress."
"A city one has lived in long enough shapes itself into one's own image, acquires the traits of one's personality, the features of one's soul. It becomes what Jorge Luis Borges once called "a map of my humiliations and failures".
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