BANU CENNETOGLU. REMOTELY SPYING ON UNCERTAINTY
printed in Camera Austria, International. No. 94, p.49-56.
ISBN 3-900508-62-3
ISSN 1015-1915
(both in English and German)
© Camera Austria, International. 2006
Banu Cennetoglu is a photographer. Her vocation is to freeze »uncertain« situations. Implementation practices of her projects deploy every possible presentation mode as the main concern of the uncompleted processes of documenting and framing. This act magnifies the state of »uncertainty« by emptying the codes of each and every space that inhabits her works.
REMOTELY SPYING ON UNCERTAINTY
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself [rather than belonging to], its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State.
(Agamben)1
She had been monitoring and recording the same spot from a distance for months. She spent hours each day uncovering the alchemy of this unusual area, inhabiting three distinct divisions: a lavishly designed brand new beach; Turkish State Railways Recreation Camp; and the Military Zone. Haunted by curiosity, she recorded like an agent, floating through the retrograde flow of the overlapping imageries of her past. The closer she got, the more she realised the segregated realities that didn’t belong to anything, but existed only in the course of their own transitory states.
In the exact sense of Agamben, these singularities communicate only in the empty space, without any link to a common property or identity. This corner in Istanbul designates an empty space without a significant codification. Yet it is almost hidden beneath the posh area that hails the monetary politics of escalating capitalism. The first segment is the beach with 39 imported palm trees. The area was converted into a private beach club after the demolition of a leisure centre that existed illegally for twenty years. The second segment is the derelict Turkish State Railways Recreation Camp, which has been inhabited by 160 Chechen refugees for the last six years.
Finally, the third segment is a typical Military Zone: the soldiers are in a constant cycle of standing guard, but the shell of the segment looks the same due to their uniforms and locations; it is impossible to detect the changes of this organism with static camouflage. These three segments are located side by side without any connection or interference with each other. The strict borders between them imply socially determined mental gaps. There is no direct communication, opposition, or negotiation. These segments simply exist in their own language. The most »uncertain« segment is the Recreation Camp with its invisible and unrecorded inhabitants. The semi-presence of the refugees denotes a redundant situation, which the system seems to tolerate temporarily. Therefore, being expropriated from the system turns this segment into a real threat, also foreshadowing menace for the users of the system.
»Are there any palm trees in Grozny?« (2005) tracked the log of the uncertain and unpredictable developments in a specific time-frame. Nonetheless, the log creates a sense of timeless voyeurism, which could be extracted from any other geography. In like manner, Cennetoglu rendered a series of photographs in a book entitled »False Witness« (2002). Although the starting point of the series was the Asylum Seeker Registration Centre in Ter Apel, The Netherlands, the book was diversified with cumulated photographs of parallel cases. The sense of uncertainty blended with the depicted states of »not belonging« and »not possessing«. Once again, such unregistered states imply a potential threat. Controlling someone is only possible through an attached belonging. Once an entity has nothing to register to the system, it acquires the stigma of an uncontrolled energy.
It is not a resistance at all. It is the situation itself which has the potential to generate unpredictable and unwanted gestures, conflicting with the constructed collective behavioural codes through the operational logic of the system. At this point, what is at stake is the positioning of Cennetoglu as the agent to convey this information to us. The act of representing this potential threat constitutes a second degree of threat, and even the manifestation of the evidences in multiple formats starts to challenge the viewer as the witness and accomplice. As Grzinic states, »In the Lacanian analyst discourse, the agent reduces itself to the void, provoking the subject [in Cennetoglu’s case, it is the viewer] to confront the truth of its desire«.2 It may easily be read as a trap for the viewer.
In »False Witness«, the photographs hide their stories beneath their identical grains: the buildings, the interior, the architecture, the scenes, the people, the gazes of these people. Everything occurs in its own language, hence it is totally obscure. Repetitive collapse and replenishment of »uncertainty« blurs the time-space coordinates of the frames. Although Cennetoglu photographed and restored these scenes from Chamarande, Quito, Otterloo, Batumi, Ter Apel, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Glasgow, Mardin, New York, Egin, Sanli Urfa, Antwerp, Rize, and Tbilisi, these stills can address any node detached from the signifier of its co-ordinates. The broken link of the time-space coordinates of these nodes can be epitomised by borrowing terms from quantum mechanics: the effect of »non-commutativity« manifests itself as an external, constant magnetic field (Smailagic and Spallucci, 2003)3. In this respect, the »non-communicativity« (as the result of being-in-language of its own) turns the node into a separate being with its own energy. If a part is capable of producing its own energy without any connection to the outer world, it indicates an autonomous field within the system, alias a threat for the operational logic of the system.
Furthermore, »False Witness« duplicates the question concerning the »state of belonging« on two other extended levels. The first level is the format of »a book«. While the format itself poses critical questions about »re-presenting« photography, the structure of the format indicates an inquiry into the capability and the limits of the medium itself. The second level is the text in the book, which formulates the order of the photographs into the manipulated version of the corpus-based data4 for the word »measure«.
Cennetoglu always experiments with different formats in order to underline the limits and the vagueness of borders in conjunction with the uncertain time and space co-ordinates of her photographs. A similar approach is seen with »Determined Barbara« (2004), which was exhibited in different formats in a different context. The exhibition and screening route also duplicate the work: »Determined Barbara« is a voyage from Belgrade to Glamoc via Banja Luka. Barbara, located in Glamoc, is a temporary military training ground zone constructed for SFOR units. It occupies the land of 704 pre-war inhabitants of Glamoc. Their land was expropriated for construction in 1998, and in 2001 pre-war inhabitants were allowed to move back. But now, Barbara was awaiting them. Barbara itself signifies an enigma hovering around the definition of »the land« and »the inhabitants« in the course of political conflicts, territorial arrangements, and geopolitical debates. Finally, Sarajevo adds another dimension to this enigma by disguising itself through the uncertain signifiers of the exposed photographs.
Despite her clash with uncertainty, Cennetoglu deals directly with the most visible occurrences in politically, socially, and economically charged situations. Yet, the »sharpness« of her questions unfolds her stance as a photographer: What is the limit for uncertainty? What is the limit for blindness? How can pure energy be controlled? How can a disconnected temporality be documented? And how to betray art?
time and space coordinates of the nodes:
Amsterdam - Latitude: 52.3500, Longitude 4.9170 (2002)
Antwerp - Latitude: 51.2167, Longitude: 4.4167 (2002)
Banja Luka - Latitude: 44.7758, Longitude: 17.1856 (2002)
Batumi - Latitude: 41.6386, Longitude: 41.6372 (2001)
Belgrade - Latitude: 44.8186, Longitude: 20.4681 (2002)
Chamarande - Latitude: 48.5167, Longitude: 2.2167 (2002)
Egin – Latitude: 38.4000, Longitude: 38.0167 (2000)
Glamoc - Latitude: 44.0458, Longitude: 16.8486 (2004)
Glasgow - Latitude: 55.8620, Longitude: -4.2450 (2003)
Istanbul, Kalamis - Latitude: 40.966, Longitude: 29.0333 (2005)
Mardin - Latitude: 38.5333, Longitude: 35.7333 (1999)
New York - Latitude: 40.7140, Longitude: -74.0060 (1999)
Otterloo - Latitude: 52.1000, Longitude: 5.7833 (2002)
Quito - Latitude: -0.2167, Longitude: -78.5000 (2001)
Rize - Latitude: 41.0208, Longitude: 40.5219 (2001)
Sanli Urfa - Latitude: 37.1511, Longitude: 38.7928 (2001)
Sarajevo - Latitude: 43.8208, Longitude: 18.3803 (2004)
Tbilisi - Latitude: 41.7250, Longitude: 44.7908 (2001)
TerApel - Latitude: 52.8833, Longitude: 7.0667 (2002)
1 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 1993, p. 87.
2 Marina Grzinic, »The Spectralization of Europe«, in: Nebojsa Vilic (Ed.), State-Irwin, Skopje: 359 Degree Books 2000, p. 88.
3 Anais Smailagic und Euro Spallucci, »UV divergence-free QFT on noncommutative plane«, published 17 September 2003. IOP Electronic Journals: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General. http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0305-4470/36/39/103/a339l3.html
4 A corpus can be thought of as a collection of information gathered according to particular principles for some particular purpose; which is a collection where several kinds of information are stored simply because each individual one is of interest in itself. By interfering in the source data the corpus does temporarily claim to exist as a whole although the parts that make the body were not supposed to co-exist. From: Banu Cennetoglu, False Witness, Amsterdam: Idea Books 2003, p 4.
