Etel Adnan, “Voyage, War and Exile,” Al-'Arabiyya, no. 28 (1995): 5–16 →.
Çınar Atay, Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e İzmir planları (Yasar Egitim ve Kultur Vakfi, 1998).
From the author's interview with Masao Adachi, Tokyo, January 16, 2015. Also see the 2015 documentary Under the Skin, which includes an interview with Adachi →.
Jalal Toufic, “Ruins,” in Thinking: The Ruin, ed. Matthew Gumpert and Jalal Toufic (Rezan Has Museum, 2010), 37. Toufic continues: “One can preserve a war-damaged or crumbling building, but no one has any control over whether it will remain a ruin. I am fascinated by how and why war-damaged or crumbling buildings turn from ruins, with their idiosyncratic, often labyrinthine temporality, to more or less precisely datable structures in chronological time,” 37.
Sabu Kosho combines these concepts of ruin, disaster, and capitalism in his explanation of the meaning of Fukushima: “Disaster is the real experience of people the world over. Catastrophe is the synergetic disruption of social and environmental processes, increasingly appropriated by the modus operandi of contemporary capitalism and states. Apocalypse is a metaphysical, imaginative, and affective device for us to confront the world in degeneration and to envision its radical change. These are considered as the conceptual components of what the singular name Fukushima implies for us today.” Radiation and Revolution (Duke University Press, 2021), 4.
Anthropologist, theorist, and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli is a member of the Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous media group of approximately thirty members, most of whom are based in the Northern Territories of Australia. Initiated in 2008 as a form of grassroots activism, Karrabing approaches filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary unequal social conditions. With their films and installations, the collective exposes the long shadow cast by colonial power. See →.
Thomas Keenan, “Counter-Forensics and Photography,” in Autonomous Archiving, ed. Ozge Celikaslan, Alper Sen, and Pelin Tan (DPR Barcelona Publishing, 2016), 22.
For more history on the neighborhood of Haynots Mahallesi, which had a population of fifteen thousand before 1922, see the book R. G. Hovannisian, Armenian Smyrna/İzmir (Aras Yayıncılık, 2018), 226–29.
See Songul Geldi, “Savas sonrasi Beyrut'ta Mekansal Bellek, İmge ve Travma” (Spatial memory, image, and trauma in postwar Beirut) (Ph.D thesis, Mardin Artuklu University, 2019, advisor: Pelin Tan).
“Concerning a surpassing disaster, collateral damage includes much of what those who are insensitive to such a disaster view as having been spared. A filmmaker, thinker, writer, video maker, or musician who in relation to a surpassing disaster still considers that tradition has persisted, never has the impression that he has to resurrect even some of what ‘survived’ the carnage; who can ask, ‘Why have I survived and why has this building been spared while so much else was destroyed?’ without any suspicion that the building in question as well as many books and artworks that had the good fortune of not being destroyed materially have nonetheless been immaterially withdrawn by the surpassing disaster, is hypocritical, that is, hypo-critical, still this side of the critical event of the surpassing disaster.” Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009), 15 →.
Adnan, “Voyage, War and Exile,” 5.
Edward Said, Reflection on Exile and Other Essays (Granta Books, 2000), 350.
Novels by Mehmed Uzun include Siya Evîne (Sel Yayıncılık, 2020) and Hawara Dîcleyê (Sel Yayıncılık, 2020). Uzun has also published essay collections on the theme of exile.
Although the witness is often someone who experienced the disaster first hand, this does not mean they have the language to testify to it. The fragmented language of trauma often cannot communicate the complete lived experience. The testimonies of witnesses are also often affected by accounts of the disaster that appear in newspapers, photos, and films For a related discussion on survivors and witnesses, see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. H. Roazen (Zone Books, 1999), 17.
The novella was originally published in Armenian. The first Turkish version appeared in 2018 as Surgun Ruhum (Aras Yayıncılık). The sentence quoted here was translated by Pelin Tan from the Turkish version (p. 33): “Fakat en azından biz, biz sanatçılar sürgünde yoldaş olabiliriz.”
