Way Up

The installation Way Up is a 16 meters long ladder made up of three different materials from top to the ground; feather, chain and tow. The ladder is hung on the outside wall of the main stairwell of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University. The wall is the only white block that faces the courtyard of the building. Tow is the first material and it touches the ground. Sourcing from earth, its shape like a braid implies how natural a process starts and develops such as the hair growth. Tow is followed by chains, a phase of hardships and also strengthening. The highest part of the ladder is made up of feathers. 

NIL ADMIRARI

Boredom in its stillness can be fatal for human beings. This statement is not derived from Kierkegaard’s words on boredom, but from the very own experience of mine. I started smoking on a day when I was waiting for a friend who did not show up until two hours after the meeting time. When one is waiting for something to happen in life, at the same time knowing that hope is the most fatal of all, life gets so boring that, that person finds herself going to the closest tobacco shop, buying a pack of cigarettes on which “smoking kills” is written in bold letters. The reason why I gave this example is that it is a very simple analogy to analyse the implications of Kierkegaard’s passage in question. 

“So all people are boring… Idleness, it is usually said, is a root of all evil.” ‘Boring’ can describe a person who bores others as well as one who bores himself… how strange it is that those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others.” I will use the analogy above to personify Kierkegaard’s two kinds of boring people. In this analogy, the friend that I was waiting for is the one who bores others - in this case, me - in Kierkegaard’s words “the one who is busy in the world in one way or another”, as he was late to our meeting because he was too busy in life. Since I am the noble boring one, that I bore myself, I wait there until he comes thinking about time, life and why cell phones don't exist yet, while smoking. After thinking for two hours, I develop some ideas on the flow of life, which entertain him after I present them when he comes. Kierkegaard explains why I started smoking more aesthetically “The more profoundly they bore themselves, the more powerful a means of diversion they offer others, when boredom reaches its zenith, either by dying of boredom (the passive form) or (the active form) by shooting themselves out of curiosity.”

From a psychological perspective, boredom is defined to arise not for a lack of things to do but the inability to latch onto any specific activity. This definition brings in the discussion of idleness related to boredom in Kierkegaard’s essay. He rejects the common belief that ‘idleness is a root of all evil’ in the sense that being idle means doing nothing. Since boredom is related to action, there cannot be boredom in doing nothing. Here again, I refer to his aesthetic utterance “There is a kind of restless activity that keeps a person out of the world of spirit and puts him in a class with the animals, which from instinct must always be on the go.” In this context, he favors idleness and condemns boredom as the root of evil, because idleness is the liberation from the unattractive obligations, and creates the necessary space for the soul to vary itself.

Even though he favors idleness, he does not take it as an applicable solution to the problem of boredom because he claims that there are very few souls who can reunite with the divine in idleness. Therefore, he approaches the solution as other boring people do, calling out for change. This issue of change is a recurrent theme in his other essays in Either/Or as well. His critical point in the issue of change is that boring people are in need of change all the time without even considering the reason why they need it. It does not matter which persona of Kierkegaard's is criticising, aesthetic or ethical, he comes up with the same conclusion that change, for example in the form of travelling from place to place, is useless if the soul is not organised to achieve its aim. As he states in the first sentence of his essay, it is very sensible to start from a principle. So he starts from a principle in his search for change and suggests the method of ‘crop rotation’.

By using the phrase ‘crop rotation’ he gives an explanation to the general misunderstanding in the application of change. He clearly states that changing of soil will not resolve the problem, so what is required for change to work in the expected fruitful manner is to change the method of cultivation and type of grain. To do so, he introduces the resourceful rule of limitation through having control on remembering and forgetting. At this point the problem becomes a matter of art. An artistic way of living is presented as the solution to overcome the fatality of hope. The art of forgetting then becomes the key element in his search for the solution, as he puts it “Being able to forget depends always on how one remembers, but how one remembers depends in turn on how one experiences reality. The person who sticks fast in it with the momentum of hope will remember in a way that makes him unable to forget.” He also warns the reader against the threat of remembering poetically, which is a subtle line that one should not cross in order to keep the reins of joy.

            
The following discussion on friendship and marriage in the essay can be seen as a very well reasoned justification of him calling off his engagement with Regine Olsen. The important point in this discussion is its relation to the idleness of the soul. The previous discussion was on the idleness of the person that was described as the liberation from the unwanted actions. Idleness of the soul here refers to the liberation of the soul from any kind of socially forced engagement. He refers to those kind of engagements as joy-killers and potential causes of boredom. Therefore, he concludes that one should be arbitrary to constantly vary oneself.

            
I also believe that joy has a lot to do with allowing oneself the necessary space to vary one's soul through the unexpected, either in the form of idleness or let's say meditation rather than the hopeless loop of hope. This may seem paradoxical because being aware of the unexpected is kind of  an expectation in itself, but with the unexpected, there is a story which has not been designed yet. Once again and for the last time I turn to Kierkegaard:

“To the arbitrariness within oneself there corresponds the accidental outside one. One should therefore always keep an eye open for the accidental, always be expeditus if anything should offer. The so-called social pleasures, for which one prepares eight of fourteen days in advance, have no great interest. Through accident, on the other hand, even the least significant thing can become a rich source of amusement.”       

Phases, Munich, 2011

Repeat & Realize

“I prefer talking to children, with them one can still hope they may become rational beings; but those who have become that -- Lord save us!”    -    Kierkegaard

                  Philosophy is the discipline concerned with how one should live and what is the essential nature of existence. Then, as Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, if “philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward”, one is perfectly right to ask when one should start questioning the past and consider the future. There is obviously a time issue in the above sentence and in the totality of Kierkegaard’s works. The distinction between the past, the moment and the future, in its ambiguity, is related to the matter of becoming and being in Kierkegaard’s universe. The case with the children, being unaware of the past, is that they are constantly living in the moment. The problem starts after reaching a certain point when one becomes conscious with his actions. This is the point when one is able to recall and appreciate the past activities and starts making plans for the future. This consciousness is also related with the realization of death. Kierkegaard refers to the problem as despair, sickness unto death;

“Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and accordingly can take three   forms: in despair not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strict sense); in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself.”

            According to his above classification, it is obvious that what he calls despair is to be aware of oneself. What is more important for him than being aware of the self is what to do with the self. The distinction is clear, either one is aware of the self and is not happy with it, or he is aware of the self but cannot achieve to be a whole. On a broader sense, this the problem of existence related to time. The problem with the time can be discussed on two different levels, one is the process of becoming aware of the self and the second is the process of being the self. To explain the first level it will be appropriate to bring in the discussion of Greek philosophy. What Greek philosophy teaches, especially Socrates, is the methodology to take one out of his blindness. This methodology can be explained as questioning the nature of existence by using dialectics. Given that there is a form of the good, the individual should reposition his existence relating to the transcendent. He should search for the truth first by looking at the ultimate good, and with the acquired knowledge he should then turn inwards and find its correspondence in his soul to realize the reason of his existence. It is possible to say that Kierkegaard is in favor of Greek philosophy in his search for truth. His inquiry on Christianity relies on his belief in the transcendent, but he is not happy with the Christian methodology. He rather emphasizes the importance of dialectics than a blindfolded acceptance of what has been told. In that sense, his categorization of being aware of the self again coincides with Greek philosophy. Socrates explains the experience of self realization as painful, because the soul which is not ready for the truth will be afraid of the result of its search and will try to fit in the norms of the society again, this is the category in Kierkegaard who are not happy with the self and try convert it to something else. The second category contains the people who try to unify with their self to become a whole.

            Kierkegaard refers to the experience of the second category and takes the inquiry to a further level claiming that repetition is the way for the ones in that category to live a happy life;

“Repetition is the new category that will be discovered. If one knows anything of modern philosophy and is not entirely ignorant of Greek philosophy, one will readily see that this category precisely explains the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus, and that repetition-proper is what has mistakenly been called mediation.”

In that passage, he refers to Hegel’s ‘dialectical unity’ that is a cognitive process of reconciling mutually interdependent, opposed terms as what one could loosely call "an interpretation" or "an understanding of".  Given the explanation it is hard to separate repetition from Hegel’s dialectical unity as Kierkegaard also implies above that Hegel mistakenly calls it ‘mediation’. What I understand from repetition that Kierkegaard describes is that it is the action of acknowledging the self and unifying with it. That is to say, in order for one to repeat himself, he should be very well aware of the nature of his existence. It requires an understanding of his past actions, a reconciliation between the past and the present, and approval for the future actions in the same pattern.

            Kierkegaard makes a distinction between recollection and repetition in the sense that;

 “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out life again, for example, that he has forgotten something.”

What he claims above is that a life lived backwards, this is not to be confused with ‘understood backward’, makes a person unhappy. Living backwards, for me, is the same to be stuck at some moment in the past. Kierkegaard relates that position with hope. If a person has deadly hope, it is more likely for him to stick with the past because that expectance is never likely to be satisfied. To put it differently, if there is hope, the person will choose to stick with the beauties of the past not to ruin those image by taking any brave actions.

To conclude, repetition for Kierkegaard is the way for the individual who realized his self and wants to unite with it in order to live a happy life. The ones who avoid that painful journey will be lost in recollection and never be able to achieve the outcomes of  a happy life. He claims that if a person who wants to actualize himself in this life, he should refer to repetition because it is an understanding of life backward and at the same time living forward;

“He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will perish.”

art.homes Munich, 2011

Big Babol, 2010

Big Babol is a collaborative work, by me and Simona Zemaityte, composed of chewed gums sticked onto the chicken wires by the visitors of the event and a video reflected on the gummy surface. It is an interactive installation uniting the visitors of the event in a very simple, childish and intimate way.

For the video to be reflected on the gummy surface, Simona shares a much different, political memory of her own, yet childish as every child had similar experiences:

USSR under the flavor of a smuggled "Donald Duck"

“I was born in a country that no longer exists. But I am Lithuanian. My mom says USSR was oppressive. My grandma says it was violent. All I remember about it is actually a chewing gum. USSR was political. Sorry to say, but my generation have learned about it at school. We never really lived it. Our memories are left in the margins of a big history. Yet they have a right to be spoken. Next year it will be 10 years after the official collapse of Soviet Union. The Big Bubble...”

Kutup Çizgisi Aşıkları

Yönetmen Julio Medem’in detaylar konusundaki tüm titizliğini gözardı ederek Kutup Çizgisi Aşıkları olarak Türkçe’ye çevrilmiş Los Amantes Del Circulo Polar. Birebir çevirilerin kulağa zaman zaman saçma geldiği doğru olsa da, bu kadar yoğun sembolizm yüklü olan böyle bir filmin adının da başlıbaşına bir sembol olduğunu görmek zor olmasa gerek. Orjinal adını birebir kutup dairesi aşıkları olarak çevirerek filmin bir kısmının kutup dairesinde geçmesinin yanında, doğrusal bir zaman kurgusu değil de dairesel bir zaman anlayışı olduğunun da altını çizerek Medem’in hakkını verebiliriz.

Önceki filmleri Tierra (1996), La Ardilla Roja (1993), ve Vacas (1991)’a benzer şekilde Los Amantes Del Circulo Polar’da da tesadüfler, şans ve kader temaları üstüne yoğunlaşan Medem, kaderin böylesi dedirten bir film yapmış. Filmin aşıkları Ana ve Otto, tersten de aynı şekilde okunabilen palindromik isimleriyle sanki doğuştan birbirleri için yaratılmışlar. Zaten çocukluktan başlayan aşklarını, ergen ve yetişkin halleriyle üçer farklı oyuncunun da (Ana’yı sırasıyla Sara Valiente, Kristel Diaz ve Najwa Nimri; Otto’yu da Peru Medem, Victor Hugo Oliveira ve Fele Martinez oynuyor) doğallıkları sayesinde sanki elimizde büyümüşler gibi bir samimiyetle izliyoruz. Otto bir topun ardından koşarken annesinden kaçan Ana’yla karşılaşır, bu ilk tesadüf aynı evde yaşamalarına varan tesadüfler zincirinin ilk halkasını oluşturur. Yasanılan aşk, dozu bakımından Yann Samuell’in yönettiği Jeux D’enfants’ı andırırken, tesadüfi olarak iki film için de aynı soruyu sorduğumu farkediyorum, neden ayrılmak zorunda kalıyorlar? Los Amantes Del Circulo Polar’da da bu soruya mantıklı bir yanıt bulamayıp, ayrılık olmadan aşk kendini var edemiyor mu sorusunda daha da çıkmazlara düşmemek adına, aşkın doğasından ötürü, aşk filmlerinin de böyle kör noktaları olması gerektiği genellemesini yaparak işin içinden çıkmaya karar verdim.

Film bu aşk hikayesini iki kahramanın da bakış açısından bölüm bölüm sunuyor. Bu sayede olan olayların önce sonuçlarını daha sonra da Ana ve Otto’nun gözlerinden kendi sebeplendirmelerini görüyoruz. Anlatımın kronolojisinin bu yolla bozulup filmin dairesel zamanlamasına uyarlanan olaylar, daha Ana’nın gözlerinde Otto’nun yansımasını gördüğümüz ilk sahneyle başlıyor. Kolaylıkla tahmin edileceği üzere bu aslında son sahne, yani çember bu noktada birleşiyor. Çemberin üstünde bu noktada başlayıp yine aynı noktada biten yolculukta kullanılan çoğul perspektif, kamera hakimiyetini yıkıp, kameranın gösterdiklerinin gerçekliğini sorgulamak için oldukça başarılı kullanılmış. Hatta bu gerçekliği daha iyi sorgulayabilmek için olaylar çifte kavrulmuş lokum tadında ikram edilmis. Lokum dediysek, kolay yenilir yutulur olduğunu düşünmeyin, film epey acıklı bir halet-i ruhiyeyle uğurluyor misafirlerini. Yine de Medem’in misafirperverliğini es geçmemek adına eklemek lazım, mutlu sonla biten aşk filmlerini sevenlerin yüreği de kaldırabilsin diye filmin yine Jeux D’enfants’takine benzer bir çoktan seçmeli sonu olduğunu söylemek mümkün ama bu mutlu son sadece böyle de olabilirdi demek için verilmiş, yanı acı sonu daha da perçinleyen bir seçenek olarak kalmaktan öteye gidemiyor.

Medem’in bu tesadüfler üstüne kurulu filminin Woody Allen’in herkesin bir başkasıyla rastlaştığı filmlerinin kendiliğindenliğiyle, Krystof Kieslowski’nin bu rastlaşmalara kattığı dogaüstü motifler arasında bir noktada kaldığını söylemek mümkün. Şans mı, kader mi sorusu üstüne düşünmenin yani sıra, özellikle İspanyol sinemasının diline aşina olanların çözmekten keyif alacağı bir sarmal bulmaca Ana ve Otto. İsteyen sağdan başlasın, isteyen soldan…