“the cracking patterns of being a family”: Interview with Asya Leman
12/03/2022
“the cracking patterns of being a family”: Interview with Asya Leman
Gözde İlkin
Many thanks to Asya Leman, whose works and artistic practice I had the opportunity to engage with upon the invitation of the Ankara Queer Art program, for her sharings, and to Aylime Aslı, who made all that happen. In her practices of production and accumulation, Leman meddles in the cracking patterns of being a family, the safe spaces we try to create inside and outside home, and the different forms of making our voices heard. We had a conversation around her video works Aile Cüzdanı (2020) and Hükmü Yok (2018), where she reproduces her personal stories with queer sounds and forms.
How would you define your artistic practice? When did you start working with video images and sound, what was the first trigger or question?
My work with video images and sounds was shaped through my studies at Istanbul Bilgi University, Photography and Video Program. Looking at that period from the present, it seems the most powerful factor in my artistic practice was impossibilities. On one side of this was a state of inactivity imposed by the economic impossibilities I found myself in at that time, on the other side, I was producing with a sense of escapism and "saving myself" combined with a kind of class anger. Therefore, rather than focusing on a subject and doing research around it, I can say that my productions came like explosions following long periods of struggling desperately, letting myself into the arms of daily or periodically overflowing emotions.
For example, Hükmü Yok (2018), a docu-fiction short film which was my graduation project, was just one of those explosions. Trans subjects lie at the heart of the film. It depicts the psychological violence they are frequently exposed to in daily life in the context of visibility in the public sphere. The first trigger for this film was obviously my mother. She came to visit me in Istanbul and we were out for a walk together on Istiklal Street. When she saw a trans passing by, there was a moment that she goggled at me. I cannot describe the anger I felt against her at that moment. Because with that staring, that goggling, that astonishment and maybe even mocking, in a way she was actually judging me as well. That's why throughout the film protagonist Burçak wanders the streets of Istanbul with joy and self-confidence springing from the great pleasure she drew from her own existence. At the end of the film, a trans flag stays on the screen for a long time.
Your video exhibited in Aşikar Sır held by Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi [Truth, Justice, Memory Center] in 2019 features the places where the enforced disappeared were detained. How did all this begin? What were the images you collected while describing the emptied place once occupied by the disappeared?
Actually, it started when I met with Anıl Olcan's work including the prints of the passport photographs of the forcible disappearances on marble stones at a workshop held by the Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi in 2017, and developed into a collective production. The idea of curating an exhibition around this work was on the agenda as part of the events organized by Hafıza Merkezi for International Week of the Enforced Disappeared. When Kerem Çiftçioğlu, the communication and advocacy coordinator of Hafıza Merkezi, Anıl Olcan and me were surveying our memory of the names and faces of the forced disappearances, we realized that there was no memory of the places where these people were disappeared. The idea of the exhibition started to take shape when we dug into the database of Hafıza Merkezi and realized that the places where the disappeared were "detained” in Istanbul are in fact places we frequently pass through in our daily life. In order to avoid these marble stones produced by Anıl becoming a monument, I made an editing in which I tried to turn these stones from statues or monuments into memory stones that mark those spaces, rather than tombstones that do not exist. While framing these spaces, I tried to create instructions that could help inscribing the places into memory by including the signboards within the frame as if we were drawing a mental map.
In Ankara Queer Art Program, you spent a time thinking and producing from the center of the bureaucratic structure that you have sort of dismantled in your works. Did you have any idea or a specific project in your mind when you applied to the program?
TAPA made its open call, at the time when I applied to Ankara Queer Art Program. I was just working on Aile Cüzdanı project, so I also referred to this project in my application to Ankara Queer Art Program. However, the main motivation behind my application was that the program offered me a space where I could hear my voice, which I found very weak. So, I did not go to Ankara with a finalized idea in my mind. There I found an opportunity to return and reconsider my works which I left unfinished or trivialized asking myself "so, what is this now?". These works also consist of the images that I can store or record digitally. Moreover, since I usually dive into my personal archives when producing, which are mostly materials like official documents, family albums, diaries, and notes, my practices rather take place in my own safe zone.
Rather than applying to the Ankara Queer Art program with a new project, you precisely mentioned that you are returning to the unfinished and, in a sense, failed ideas that have let unfolding of queer becoming in different forms. What were these works and ideas you focused on and preferred to complete during the AQA program? Did the pending, dormant ideas lead to new encounters and questions? Apart from the visibility offered by the program, how did the time you spent in the city and the program affect your production and work practice?
I'm not sure if I can define these works as completed. I would rather call it as a change in my perspective on "failed" ideas and works, right in the sense you mean. It became an occasion to discover that the works I produced intermittently were not fragmentary stories, but interconnected ideas. It was interesting that the time I spent in the AQA Program was in stark contrast with what I experienced in TAPA
In your works, you elaborate on the issue of identity through different voices, stories and motifs based on life. How do you define yourself, your sense of identity and your different forms of identity among these plural voices?
Identity and belonging are fluid concepts for me. More precisely, over time, I realize that I like to play with identities, and that I want to break their stability by rejecting the identities assigned to me. It seems inevitable to ask questions like how I turn inside out the identity inherited from the father or the ancestors is determined by social criteria, and how I can play with it. In this way, inserting myself into certain "modes'' and looking outward from within that mode, I may be questioning my sense of identity and belonging. The installation Aile Cüzdanı (2020) was the most self-evident manifestation of this questioning. The fact that I have an official marriage based on my assigned female identity turned into an act of dismantling and resuturing, allowing me to reconsider being a "married woman” from within the bureaucratic and social mechanism of marriage.
Your video Hükmü Yok begins with the story of the character who forgot her/his headset and wanted it back; I interpret that forgetting and reclaiming as a demand of being heard and a declaration of her/his own existence. In the installation Aile Cüzdanı, the sound of stamping as a symbol of the official processes we are accustomed to is distorted with repetitions and moved away from its object; we are actually listening to the destruction of the bureaucracy's familiar sound. How can we make a queer reading on this rhythm disorder? What are the spaces and forms that you make visible and highlight through sounds in your works?
This question sounds particularly interesting and exciting to me, because, I think, I am not aware of the fact that the concept of sound is so prominent in my video works. I think it develops somewhat more intuitively. The film Hükmü Yok was produced in guerilla style of videomaking by a team of 5 queer (lubunya) people who are not professional in sound and video recording but voluntarily conributed to the work. Given the glances and the verbal abuses we were subjected to during filming, (these are mostly related to our appearance and identity), and the verbal violence committed by the security guards of the Gezi park while recording the short scene in the film, it is inevitable that the narrative in the film is interpreted as a demand to be heard, a declaration of your own existence.
Aile Cüzdanı and the video performance had never been displayed together at any venue. This performance/video that I recorded on the last day of the Tabiatımız [Our Nature] exhibition held at the end of the TAPA program, was also something I revisited during the AQA program. One of the reasons why the sound is so prominent in the video is the effect of the acoustics in the place where the installation is located. It was a conscious decision to make use of the acoustics of the space during the performance. However, when I arrived at the stage of editing the video, how the one in [Man] Power systematizes the domination by holding the stamp of approval in his hands as a bureaucratic tool for classifying, approving or disapproving, has become spontaneously sensible through the sound. I was trying to create a kind of playful mechanism through repetitions of sound and action. This playing is so simple and so subject to the present moment itself that I resemble it to a baby laughing for minutes at a 'peek-a-boo' or a child not ever getting bored of repeating the same thing over and over in a game he/she has improvised with adults.
In Aile Cüzdanı, you present a multilingual arrangement of audio, embroidery and photo collages. How would you interpret the act of cutting, combining, extracting and multiplying in your works with regard to Queer forms of resistance?
Aile Cüzdanı began to take shape in my private space, in the first weeks of the pandemic, when I dived into my personal archives and it was to me in a way a witch's rite. I found myself left alone with burdening official documents that I did not or could not throw away and could not treat them as garbage since they included so much personal information, so I was trying to find out what to do with this stack of papers. The acts of cutting and extracting intended to render these documents unrecognizable, when merging with embroidering, combining, multiplying, evolved into an effort to feminize the whole patriarchal mechanism - in which the most obvious thing to me was the lifeless and monotonous style of the bureaucracy. Here, we can understand "feminization" as twisting the language deemed by power to be "so warm as not befitting a man", and not taking it seriously. The inspiration here comes from the power of the LGBTI+ movement in Turkey to transform the obstacles standing on its way. A firm but sarcastic stand in resistance practices such as dispersing into various parts of the city to read manifestos when the police say "Disperse!", responding "we are fags, so what” when the society says you are faggots, or saying oneself “now that the state doesn't allow us to march and forces us to run to escape the police on the chase, then let's create our own sports field and organize events such as queer olympix.” All known as "gullüm".
You are involved in collective works with different groups, how do the networks and people you contact with affect your artistic practice?
Lub 28, what kind of needs was this new initiative born out of? How would it evolve in your opinion?
Along with our public spaces narrowed by the Power and our interrupted working lives, the forms of our social relationships have also changed, which has inevitably brought about different solidarity practices. In this respect, I can say that in our intersections with different groups and collectives, our practices are becoming increasingly solidarity based.
For example, Pride Ride, the video-action we carried out with our bicycles on the 27th of June 2020 Pride March day, when no call for march in Taksim could be made for the first time due to the pandemic... At the times of frequent and long lockdowns, between definite hours going out by bicycle, but not on foot, was allowed. We wanted to take advantage of the situation, and by a detour around the rule, we made a Pride Ride on a route starting from Şişli/Kurtuluş and ending at Tünel Square, with a group of queer bikes, and recorded this video-action. It was an experience that was both very empowering and tightening the bonds among us. Even though later we often came together to produce projects, as survival concerns became a high priority, some projects could not be realized and some others left unfinished. It was right at this point that I came up with Lub 28, dreaming of a space of production where we can listen to each other's needs, take care of each other, and make our ideas real. I intend to build a space conducive to collective production, which would bring together many creative bodies with different fragilities and identities, particularly those producing in visual and auditory arts, and which will promote and expand their works in both technical and theoretical respects. For sure, we can do this only collectively.