1 kHz

“These three distinct notions appear as manifestations of a very particular kind of individuation produced by a time that does not beat in pulses: soundscapes, audible colors, rhythmic personalities. In my view, we can no longer think in terms of matter and form. We have already left behind the belief in a hierarchy that moves from the simple to the complex, from matter to life to spirit, across nearly every field. We have even imagined that life is only a simplification of matter; perhaps life’s rhythms do not arise from some spiritual force at all, but instead from molecular pairings. Is not this entire matter-form hierarchy — a more or less primitive matter and a more or less informed sonic form — precisely what we stop hearing, and what composers have also ceased to produce? What emerges here is a carefully shaped sonic material, no longer a primitive substance waiting to be given form. The pairing now lies between this highly worked sonic material and forms that are not sound in themselves, yet become sonic or audible through the material that renders them perceptible. Debussy’s Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea stands here as a clear example. Material exists in order to make audible a force that is not audible in itself: time, duration, even intensity. The pair matter-form gives way to the pair material-forces.”
— Gilles Deleuze, from Why We Are Not Musicians

May 2009 / Istanbul… A bridge foundation is being dug in the Golden Horn, for the metro crossing over the sea. The heavy cranes striking the seabed produce rhythmic blows that spread across the historic peninsula and Istanbul’s other ancient districts, marking and transforming the atmosphere of everyday life. On the surface, the sound pulls us into a kind of mystical musical time; at a deeper level, it suggests that what is happening is altering the city on a vast scale. So much so that this sound pushes all familiar noise to the background and reduces the whole city to the scale of a medieval blacksmith’s street. In that singular moment, the artist responds to the city’s collapse before an unfamiliar sound by pressing the shutter from a point along the shore, inviting us into a twofold journey — spiritual and political — through the fibers of a socio-biological condition in which sound briefly becomes matter.”
— Levent Duran, original text

Çocuk Var

Between 2010 and 2011, I participated as a photographic artist in Sound Shift Culture On the Edge: Istanbul Marseille, a project curated by Euphonia Radio Grenouille, Lokomotif Association, and Açık Radyo, within the scope of the European “Civil Society Dialogue” and “2010 European Capital of Culture: Istanbul” programs. In March 2011, I was invited to a month-long artistic residency at Franche de Marseille Station and La Friche Belle de Mai, where, together with Sophie Cohen and Christophe Modica, we presented Çocuk Var, a performative work reflecting on the traces of migration in Istanbul.