A Lithic Diary
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan
This encounter began during Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s long walks within the city from the beginning of the pandemic… Retracing remnants of the Byzantine era that have blended into the urban setting as hybrid yet silenced architectural fragments.
An encounter
‘’With the cold numbness of the passing time, I do not bother with the snowy crust covering my skin.
It doesn't snow in this city as it used to before.
But when it does… It gives a sense of comfort for being able to render and observe the flow around me without being noticed, except for the shopkeepers who find refuge between the gaps of my limbs and enjoy their chai breaks. Sometimes I hear them climbing over my slabs accompanied by unknown words that at times sound bitter and sometimes musical depending on how it flows from the mouth.
It feels like we share a common fate of being the embodiment of invisibility.
While having these voices anchoring to my aura…
I have rare spectators who become aware of my existence and observe me with their both admiring yet pitiful gazes.
The snow does not feel as cold as my petrified status
of being in between the dead and the living.
On the contrary – it feels like a new skin or a canopy that protects me from the echoes of an unwanted past.
Trying to mute my own inner and exterior demons, like a never ending monolog – I fall silent at being startled by an unexpected yet tender touch. Maybe someone hears me after all. ‘’
‘’On a cold winter day, whilst trying to maintain my balance on the slippery icy pavement,
my gaze connected with a group of stones, lying motionless on the ground at a distance surrounded by a car park and push carts or trolleys. They seemed as otherworldly as a sea of giants covered in snow that were camouflaged by market goods hung on them, piles of garbage filling their gaps and muted in between the loudness of the busy streets. What caught my attention was not only their intensity on the ground, but the way in which they were embedded within this urban setting in contrast to their scale and yet their elegance and fragility.
I had the urge to approach them and touch their surface – as if what I encountered was a rarely appearing species.
With the slight hesitancy due to the freezing cold – my fingers began to sweep away the snow on their surface – trying to follow the lines, hollows and curves engraved on their skin. At some parts the melted snow filled the gaps of these oblique lines and rather resembled a cold vein.. pumping some hope for life. Or an ever flowing river.
Amongst the Blind
What more could he do, circulating day and night
Among the ten blind men. He tried
invisible postures, indecipherable gestures – sometimes
completely naked, sometimes wearing the shirt and sword
of dead heroes, sometimes wearing the transparent dress
of the lost mythical woman; and the changes
always convincing, without need of proof. The blind men
are a lot, slept well… And he himself,
he knew perfectly well that the blind were not at all blind.
‘’Among the Blind’’ - Yannis Ritsos ( Translated by Edmund Keeley)
As I could not take our encounter off my mind, I returned back to the ruins the next day.
Today I approached it from the other side of the road. Passing through textile shops and counterfeit label/fake goods, from afar the remnants began to appear slowly. This time it felt different … in contrast to what I felt the day before through the gentle oblique carvings that were proposing a sense of a continuous flow. An eternal flow of lively energy – emanating despite the lithic body.
Today there was rather a sense of scattered pride that attempted to own up to its imperial power. I noticed circular lines resembling fingers as if a giant hand was grasping each pillar. Whilst wondering what these linear forms could be – I finally found the almost invisible name plate with a distorted text almost melted down and shriveled due to leaking water.
‘’The Forum of Theodosius (Greek: φόρος Θεοδοσίου, today Beyazıt Square) was an area in Constantinople that was originally built by Constantine I and named the Forum Tauri. In 393, however, it was renamed after Emperor Theodosius I, who rebuilt it after the model of Trajan's Forum in Rome, with a triumphal arch of Proconnesian marble erected on the west side of the Forum. The triumphal arch had column piers carved in the form of Herculean clubs grasped by a fist. The arch and the ancient buildings around it were destroyed as a result of invasions, earthquakes, and other disasters’’
I looked around – trying to imagine what the pillars would have looked like as a passageway… Thinking of the location of these stones says a lot about these shifts of power in a turbulent past. Remembering what the Beyazıt square has gone through – political and ideological clashes, historical ruptures- one can easily retrace the way how all these shaped the social sphere along with the fate of these ruins. The temporality of power broken apart in fragments and integrated within the urban setting as the remnants of an unwanted past, that were coerced to become invisible. Today they rather remain as traces resistant to time yet unseen with our blindness.
Surface tension
The wavy patterns on the surface of the pillars are often referred to and associated with peacock feathers or teardrops such as the column at the Basilica Cistern. Colloquially they are known as weeping columns. Yet they originated from a rather masculine language of power – the depiction of the club of Herakles.The Club of Heracles comes from a tree called Devil’s Walkingstick (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis ) that has several erupted thorns on its body and according to the myths, Heracles has used it as a weapon to defeat evil throughout his 12 missions.
Where would the 12 missions of Heracles stand today, as an act of overcoming the evil or the unwanted? How can a surface mirror power and fear at the same time? How can it accommodate both fragility – continuity and aggressive heroism?
Whilst thinking about all this, I came across the narrative of the10th mission which was to fetch the Cattle of Geryon* from the far West and then to bring them to Eurystheus; this marked the westward boundary of his travels. This is considered the furthermost limit reached by Heracles and at that very spot lies a lost passageway called ‘’The Pillars of Heracles’’. According to various sources this gate had an inscription that said ‘’Non-Plus Ultra’’ meaning Nothing Further Beyond serving as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further.
*Geryon – a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia (The Red Place) quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Herakles came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle. Herakles was an important Greek hero and the elimination of Geryon constituted one of his celebrated labors, framing a thrilling account of the victory over monstrosity. ‘’ From ‘’Autobiography of Red’’ – Anne Carson
PALMimsest
I have seen shadows of my touch that became embossed in my palm… marks engraved on my skin that urges to overflow towards a new surface to coexist … to seal its existence .
Surveying a palimpsest through the gaze and the touch between the terrestrial and the imaginary
Gathering the ghostly traces of these layers in my palm – embedded within my fingerprints, whilst caressing the recollections of the stone that meet with mine – The memory of my hand
Searching for a new language in between the gaps of the absent particles of the one before me.
Becoming an embodiment of reveries of the day before that resurface with the tectonics of time .
All gathered, layered, overlapping on one another as a Palmimsest.
Strata
What does the ground remember in between the noise of an accumulated past?
The rubble begins to gain a new body – a hybrid body of collective traces – memories and emotions.
It looks like a wavy strata in motion – in contrast to the static solidity of the ruins.
When the ground begins to remember… would it shake our foundations?
Each fragmented wave begins to speak or whisper time to time – murmuring in an unknown language
That is sealed on their surface – with a cubic and linear act of mark making to decipher what the ground tells us.
A dream within a dream
’Reality is a sound, you have to tune into it, not just keep yelling.
He woke fast from a loud wild dream that vanished at once and lay listening
to the splendid subtle ravines of Hades
where hardworking dawn monkeys were wheedling and baiting one another
up and down the mahogany trees.
The cries took little nicks out of him. This was when Geryon liked to plan
his autobiography, in that blurred state
between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.
Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet
the cold air of the World and stop,
as we do, just in time. The autobiography,
which Geryon worked on from the age of five to the age of forty-four,
had recently taken the form
of a photographic essay. Now that I am a man in transition, thought Geryon
using a phrase he’d learned from – ‘’
‘’Autobiography of Red’’ – Anne Carson
Open door
The landlady says :
Be careful – someone made an attempt to break in by forcing the main gate
And tells me not to leave the door open – keep your eyes open against any unwanted comer.
While watching my very own stone giants on their leave their final passage from this gate,
I stared at the open door… then to the empty street and began to wait for the carrier to come and pick up the pieces – keeping in mind the possible passage of an unknown shadow.
From the surveillance cameras – captured image of a man – somehow concluded to be a stranger /foreigner with its distorted pixelated image – the very terrifying reflection of the unwanted other… reminded me of Geryon …and of Hercules, who defeated him to conquer the unknown.
I gave another look at the gate... the landlady says: nothing further beyond.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b.1984 Istanbul) In her multidisciplinary practice, Büyüktaşcıyan unfolds ways in which memory, identity, and knowledge are shaped by deeply ingrained yet constantly evolving waves of history. Through her site specific interventions, sculptures, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan dives into terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces.
Selected exhibitions include: Tate Modern, UK (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York, USA (2021);3rd Autostrada Biennial,Kosovo (2021); 2nd Lahore Biennial, Pakistan (2020); 1st Inaugural Toronto Biennale, Canada(2019); 56th Venice Biennale National Pavilion of Armenia, Italy(2015); Jerusalem Show VII (2014); ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey(2013).