HUSEYIN ALPTEKIN

The collapse of the communist bloc in the East Europe in the beginning of the 1990s released a plethora of extrovert energies traveling worldwide but affecting most acutely the regions that border the former communist regimes in the Balkans, the Black Sea coastline, and the Caucasus. Remaining outside of the spotlight of the myopic Western media, people, goods, urban myths and cultural expressions have been exchanged intensively ever since.

“Sea Elephant Travel Agency”, a project in progress initiated by Huseyin Alptekin, was based on a novel by Jules Verne, ”Keraban the Stubborn.” The main protagonist of the story, Keraban, is a tobacco merchant based in Istanbul. His agent Van Mitten arrives from Rotterdam for a visit to Istanbul. As a gesture of generosity, Keraban invites him a dinner in Uskudar, a district on the Asiatic coast of the Bosporus. When they reach the seaside they learn that they are obliged to pay a recently announced, extra tax for crossing over the sea by boat. It is not a big amount to fuss about Keraban becomes agitated about this regulation, which he claims to be unjust and denies paying it. Still eager to keep his promise he finds another solution: to travel all along the Black Sea Coast to get to Uskudar. The rest of the novel describes the adventurous journey of Keraban and Van Mitten crossing the whole of Black Sea belt. One of the events proposed by the “Agency” aims to organize an imaginary reenactment of Verne's fiction through a boat journey with people from such different disciplines as art, literature, science, history etc. Traveling to the port cities of Varna, Constanta, Odessa, Sevastopol, Yalta, Rostov, Novossibrsk, Sochi, and Batum the boat will circulate its passengers at each port and revitalize the rich historical network interrupted by the national borders and the political polarizations of the 20 th century.

The “Capacity” series of Alptekin, a project that exhibits another alternative mapping, brings together photographs of street plates of some hotels in Istanbul that are named after a city. Some of them have names like Paris, Vienna, Milano, Amsterdam, names that are attracted to the glamour of the wealthy Europe. Others are assumedly marked by personal histories; names like Berlin, Sidney, Canada and Wiesbaden may be, one thinks, may refer to the cities in which the hotel owners worked before and saved money to establish their businesses in their home country. Some other names like Baku, Sarayevo, Zagreb reflect geographic proximities and give clues about the identity of their expected customers; people who visit Istanbul mainly overnight for ‘luggage commerce'. In the extreme, some extravagant names as Rio, Tibet, Tanca, Capacabana, Lima, Padova merely reveal fantasies of the owners, who, most, probably, never in their lives visited those cities. The word ‘capacity' in Alptekin's work, which was inscribed on the rectangular compositions of those photograph parcels by a cheap and kitsch lighting system, points at the potentialities shaped by the intertwined dynamics of capital, fantasy, appropriation and the multifarious routes of transversality.

Many works of Alptekin employ materials that are on the move-cigarette boxes, postcards, and so on. A series of panels he designed, bearing a couple of inscribed words, make use of sequins, a material with a seductive quality through its shimmering flutter on the panels. The mobility of sequin derivers from its flow between conflicting segments of the society, between kitsch and glamour-first from the gay and drag scenes to the vanguard fashion design and then from the stores of fancy designer labels, and to the high street billboards, and finally to the anti-legal pirating industries of the non-Western geographies.

The panel with the three rhyming words “Tremor, Rumour, Hoover” reminds an Istanbul-based audience of the trauma of the earthquake in the summer of 1999, a supreme force that shakes the earth and connects distant locations to each other, sometimes also through cultural fault lines. Not only the earthquake but also economic shocks produce links between remote territories; as in the case of Argentina, Brazil and Turkey, with collapsing economies despite, or perhaps because of the forced prescriptions of IMF. A further thread between geographies may be the rumour, which constructs a locality performatively, and produces a discursive community on the urban scale. The current political paranoia, which seems to have pushed this scale to much larger, global dimension, showers us with speculations, fabrications, mis- and disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Tracing them back to their origin is destined to be futile from the start. There obviously risks the threat of being sucked in and extinguished amidst this implosion of output. But the Hoover hints alternatively to the act of cleansing, or perhaps forgetting, shifting to the next, to the process of disjunction that may save us from below this debris, the rubbles of the remaining meta-narrative, of the Heimat.

(Erden Kosova)