SENA BASOZ
Sena Başöz is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Istanbul. Her artwork focuses on post-traumatic processes of healing evolving out of the importance of care, how nature self-regenerates to create a long-term balance and the organism’s capacity to repair itself. Her new publication and installation Riverbed is composed of interviews and performative gestures that she conducted during Ars Oblivionis, her autumn 2020 residency and exhibition at lotsremark Projekte in Basel. Interviewing migrants from Turkey and archivists in Basel, she focuses on what we collect, what we forget and what we preserve, with conversations set against a fictional end-of-the-world scenario inspired by current catastrophes.
Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Nazlı Çapar
Thomas Roueché Could you start by telling me a little bit about how you became an artist and the evolution of your practice?
Sena Başöz I considered being an artist from a very young age, but I studied economics instead, like many people do in Turkey. It’s a bit scary to be an artist but also, I wasn’t ready to share my art with the world. There were no role models around me, and it was not approved of; it’s not a safe road in general. After studying economics, I worked in an office for three years and I had a practice parallel to my office work before I quit my job in 2007. For one year I had this double life: I was going to the office and to the fine-art master’s programme at Yildiz Technical University. I was the only outsider. Everyone else was a graduate of a fine art university. I had this nine-to-six job for Reuters, and I started making something like a video diary. I made a series of videos about my life in the office and then I applied to Bard College with this portfolio and was accepted for an MFA. That’s how I got out of the office: by making these videos. It was a coping mechanism, at first. I felt a strong urge to make them; I thought people outside should see this. I studied film video at Bard, because it was the only school you could apply to as undecided. I sent them a painting portfolio and a video portfolio, and they decided I was better at video. I don’t know when you become an artist, but when I returned from the USA that’s when I completely turned my life towards being an artist. That was 2010. Back in Istanbul, I taught at other universities in my first few years. Then I started participating in exhibitions. I had already been in some exhibitions as an unofficial artist, and slowly I built up a practice.
TR Two topics we could discuss in relation to your new book, Riverbed, are migration and the end of the world. Have those always been topics that you have engaged with?
SB I came to the topic of migration in an indirect way and I’ve always been interested in the apocalypse. My practice is mostly based on healing processes after the experience of trauma. I don’t narrate the trauma itself – I don’t want to re-enact it – it’s focused on healing practices. I’ve realised that the backbone of my practice has become the way nature regenerates or heals itself; it’s something I can always count on. In my recent work I’ve been interested in global warming and scenarios of the end of the world, creating fictive scenarios around that. I’m being creative around this incident, which isn’t actually a trauma yet, but I’m already thinking of ways of how you experimentally work around it.
TR Is it migration as trauma that interests you?
SB No, I didn’t come to migration stories through trauma. It was because I was interested in what happens to personal stories that accumulate, get lost or are forgotten, which is why I was researching what the Basel archives hold. Later on, I realised that migrant stories are filled with trauma, but that was not my initial attraction to migrants. In 2020, I was in London at the Delfina Foundation working on a performance piece about how to activate institutional archives when we are running out of time. How will we activate all of this information that we have preserved? This project made me go back to my own personal archive, which of course doesn’t fit into an institutional structure. So when I arrived at Basel I was thinking about personal archives and I made a show in Krank Art Gallery that year about that, a part of which I shredded for the show, called A Consolation. I was interested in personal stories and the institutional archive when I went to Basel. I looked at what the city holds and I was impressed by Switzerland’s resources. Very early on n my research I met Gaby Fierz, a curator and ethnographer who works in the city. She shared with me her article called “Blank Spots: Making Migratory Archives Visible”. It mentioned that the information held about locals – white Swiss people – in the state archive of Basel is very different to the information about migrants. They have a shelf that only keeps information about breaches of migration law and it is over 1 kilometre, the longest of its kind in Switzerland. This made me wonder: if they are not in the institutional archives, how can I work with this?
TR You’ve worked before with the Hrant Dink Archives in Istanbul. How did that come about and influence your practice?
SB After my solo show in 2018, I found a job at the Hrant Dink Foundation. Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in 2007 and his former office building was made into a memorial site. I was part of the creative team preparing content for the site. I was already interested in archives as a resource for regeneration after death, material you can use to regenerate, but this real-life experience with an archive really influenced my practice and me as a person. I realised how many resources and how much time you need to work in an archive. For example, to create a two-minute video for the site, you need to spend weeks and weeks watching videos. It’s a huge job. That was one of the reasons why I came home and looked at my pile of documents and wondered, what will happen to this? I don’t even have any control over which and how many images I have on my phone. It’s such a messy situation. It’s not because there will be a museum of me after I die or that I am an important person, but everybody who works with an archive has the same question; you want to regulate the information you are accumulating. You look with that eye at what you are accumulating. I was also very influenced by Mari Kondo, the Japanese tidying-up master. I tidied up my domestic space according to her method. She’s very strict about paper material. She says keep no paper material at all. Just have five sheets of paper in a folder if you really have to. She also says that photographs should be eliminated. If you went on a journey, say to Spain, you should only have at most five photographs from this journey. I have like rolls of photographs – or let’s say, I had.
TR Did you get rid of them all?
SB I kept some, but I got rid of most of them. This was not a grim act, not a depressive act. I am not giving up on my past or anything like that. I made this work called A Consolation putting these shredded materials side by side with an endemic seaweed of the Mediterranean that looks like shredded paper. I wanted to remember and remind people of life and the cycles of knowledge. Seaweed is fragmented but it sways collectively underwater and disperses, forming piles on the beach that turns into compost. Each piece of seaweed has knowledge of the whole.
TR So how do we get to the end of the world? People in Turkey seem so preoccupied with the apocalypse – why is that?
SB Because it feels like the apocalypse each and every day. In Turkey, a very fast social and political change has taken place in our lifestyles. I was born in 1980 right after a military coup. One of the things that gives me consolation about Turkey’s political situation is the cycles of life, remembering the grand scheme of things and remembering that Turkey goes through these cycles of democracy and undemocratic times. Turkey’s journey hasn’t been smooth. When you have this wider perspective, you feel less like a victim and more like a part of a much longer process. I don’t remember the curfews of the early 1980s, but when I was at school we were raised in this patriotic way with some selective truths. There was no internet at that time, so we couldn’t really check our facts. I grew up believing that Turkey was a democratic country, but after the Gezi Park events in 2013, things started to shift very fast and then there was the military coup in 2016. After that the world as we knew it started to change drastically, as did our perspective of the future; we always have to reframe the future. You look to the past to create your vision. We constantly need to update it as Turkish people. What we learned in school is that the 1990s did not prepare us for the 2000s. You have to update this frame very frequently and that creates an anxiety as there is no firm ground beneath your feet. It feels like the end of the world and visions of the future die when they fall apart. Sometimes you feel like anything can happen next and then there are all these conspiracy theories. As a Turkish person I feel I am more inclined to think about the end of the world than the average Western person. Especially in Switzerland, I felt this very strongly. Swiss people feel secure. They are very different from Turkish people, because their country is so stable. Even though it’s in the middle of Europe, it has not engaged in wars. It’s a very different experience. You know that they have these bunkers in case of the end of the world and there is a place for every Swiss citizen underground with enough food for three years or more. If there is a nuclear catastrophe after a few years the Swiss will come out of the ground, and they will be alive.
TR Tell me a little about your work in which you combed the river in the context of all this.
SB I made the video, The Outline, on my second day in Basel, in mid-September. It was still possible at that time to swim in the river. We rushed to make this video because I was informed that in two days’ time it would be too cold to go in. I took the River Rhine as a metaphor; it’s also at the centre of the fictional scenario that I created: that it would stop flowing. Combing the river against its flow of direction could be about reversing time and also the human effort to control nature or make a difference, to regulate, let’s say. A comb regulates our hair, which is the most animalistic part of our body, and it has these equal intervals, which remind me of structured ways of thinking. Yet I also wanted to keep in mind the totality of the river and its huge flow, which is what I am afraid of. Life being too turbulent is at the base of a lot of anxiety and at times it feels like we only have a comb to regulate it. Also once you see it and appreciate it, though, you can also accept that chaos and turbulence. You need to lean back towards it; that’s what I believe in. Actually the Swiss managed to comb the river. In a few interviews people mentioned a time when the Rhine was very dirty. It was terrible; there was the Sandoz accident, chemicals in the river, fish dying, it turned their hair red. It was unthinkable that anyone would enter the river. Nowadays, the river and the riverbank have a Mediterranean air and everyone is hanging out and going swimming. So they were able to change the flow of things going towards an end or catastrophe. I combed the rivers with different combs that could be a metaphor for different paradigms, different interviews, or for my research in Basel, or any attempts to categorise and contain nature. The book itself is a work, a part of this installation; it’s an effort to preserve, a frail attempt in the face of a big flow. ◉