Moving beyond borders in former Mesopotamia. Kerem Ozan Bayraktar & Sinem Dişlis
My text “Moving beyond borders in former Mesopotamia” was a contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition Sand Storm, curated by Sarah Maske at Depot Istanbul in autumn 2020. The exhibition will travel to Galerie im Körnerpark to be on view in 2021 - don’t miss it!
The Publication can be downloaded here.
The project Sandstorm: And Then There Was Dust is a transnational exhibition dialogue between seven artists from Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. It is also a social and activist (artivist) approach to connecting these countries’ human and nonhuman ecologies. The project was initiated in 2016, by theater and film director Ayat Najafi and curator and scholar Sarah Maske. They met at the conjunction of socially critical, generative, and ecological projects and developed the idea of a transmedia long-term network.
EXCERPT
“The autumn soil continued on the other side with the same colour, the same texture. It rained on both sides of the chain.”
Choman Hardi, At the Border, 1979.
In ancient Greek mythology, the figures of the Harpies (ἅρπυια hárpyia) embodied the storm winds. They are the daughters of the sea titan Thaumas and the Okeanide Elektra and are characterized in their form as hybrid beings between woman and bird. Already ancient mythology sought to inscribe a fictional meaning into unpredictable natural phenomena and the influence of non-human actors through narratives and personifications.
As man-made control structures, political borders are an instrument for the construction of national belonging and stand for a worldview in which migration is a selective privilege. Border installations transfer the natural, undefined territory into the classification of administrative areas and trade areas and subject it to territorial ownership claims. The countries of the former Mesopotamian region in particular are historically and currently marked by conflicts over the negotiation of border lines, which can often be described as “phantom borders”. This recently coined term refers to "former, mostly political borders or territorial divisions which, once they have been institutionally abolished, continue to structure the space". (1) Storms and borders can be understood as symbols of two contrary poles, the former associating movement, unpredictability and border crossing, the latter appearing as a manifestation of forced static systems and denied migration movements.
As temporary, dynamic and hybrid entities as well as spatial aggregates, storms are non-human actors that can move across, damage, demolish and level separatist infrastructures. Where the soil is no longer fixed by roots and plants, but becomes eroded and unstable after years of conflict, the storm carries sand and dust away with it, and takes it to neighbouring countries and beyond. In German military vocabulary, “storm attack” (Sturmangriff) means a fierce, surprise attack that aims to break through the enemy's front line of defence through the high speed of movement. In many ways, the storm is a metaphor for the dynamic breaking through, the moving over static constructions: a meteorological phenomenon that has been sweeping across the earth and overcoming borders for thousands of years. The sandstorm in particular is a meteorological migrant that leaves its mark.
(1) Hannes Grandits, Béatrice von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kraft, Dietmar Müller, Thomas Serrier: »Phantomgrenzen im östlichen Europa. Eine wissenschaftliche Positionierung«, in Ibid. Phantomgrenzen. Räume und Akteure in der Zeit neu denken, (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2015), 18.