Taklak
Artistic research / Adana, Leipzig, İstanbul / Granted by SAHA (Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey)
Artistic research / Adana, Leipzig, İstanbul / Granted by SAHA (Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey)
I was visiting Istanbul in the spring of 2021, two years after I moved to
Germany. That spring, as things in my new life got more difficult,
things I left behind lost their reality respectively. The difficulties
melted away and turned into nostalgia. I took the redbud flowers,
which I had not noticed before, with me as a souvenir of the spring I
spent in Istanbul.Then I realise that this flower also bears the traces
of the Taurus Mountains where I was born and raised. With its new
name, Taklak, as my mother remembers it, the flowers in the palm
of my hand do somersaults. When I returned to Germany, I could
only find it in a botanical garden or in herbarium collections.
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In the footsteps of the botanists I met in the archives, I followed the collectors who travelled along the different coasts of the Mediterranean in the 18th and 19th centuries. Taklaks who had been collected from lands that have become a nostalgia for many in the diaspora in Europe connect the coasts. In similar climates, the tree was named differently: Zamzarik on the southern coasts of the sea, Koutsoupia on the islands, Dara Cihûda in the mountains that cross borders, Judah Tree in religious books, Cercis Siliquastrum in Latin. In the meantime, Taklak had paradoxical meanings in these climates: Some use this name for traitor, some for resolute, some for revolution, and some for coup d’etat.
Taklak is a research that starts with an encounter on a street I know and continues in unfamiliar countries and archives, producing its own methods and language. It is a multi-layered assemblage of seeds, names, meanings, symbols, testimonies and memories gathered during the wanderings around the Mediterranean. The publication is meant to be a route that travels between these layers. In this journey where representations are as diverse as encounters, it is an invitation that aims to take the viewer on a trip and to make them think about the questions of earth, rooting, and borders that I ask in pursuit of belonging. This journey explores the healing potentials of search and narrative. On the other hand, it is an alternative historical narrative between the personal and the social with what it records.
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In the footsteps of the botanists I met in the archives, I followed the collectors who travelled along the different coasts of the Mediterranean in the 18th and 19th centuries. Taklaks who had been collected from lands that have become a nostalgia for many in the diaspora in Europe connect the coasts. In similar climates, the tree was named differently: Zamzarik on the southern coasts of the sea, Koutsoupia on the islands, Dara Cihûda in the mountains that cross borders, Judah Tree in religious books, Cercis Siliquastrum in Latin. In the meantime, Taklak had paradoxical meanings in these climates: Some use this name for traitor, some for resolute, some for revolution, and some for coup d’etat.
Taklak is a research that starts with an encounter on a street I know and continues in unfamiliar countries and archives, producing its own methods and language. It is a multi-layered assemblage of seeds, names, meanings, symbols, testimonies and memories gathered during the wanderings around the Mediterranean. The publication is meant to be a route that travels between these layers. In this journey where representations are as diverse as encounters, it is an invitation that aims to take the viewer on a trip and to make them think about the questions of earth, rooting, and borders that I ask in pursuit of belonging. This journey explores the healing potentials of search and narrative. On the other hand, it is an alternative historical narrative between the personal and the social with what it records.
