In Their Sources ~ by Öykü Özgencil

Öykü Özgencil's "In Their Sources" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).

Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.

In Their Sources

Öykü's question: Can I allow it to pass through me?

Öykü's intro:

In Their Sources is a living inquiry into the elemental memory held in water, breath, and bodily fluids- fluid archives that exceed language and resist containment. The work draws on matrilineal threads and riverine paths to question essentialist notions of origin, offering instead a multiplicity of sources: fractured, fragile, and fertile. It positions vesselhood—glass, body, voice—as porous carriers of transindividual memory. Engaging with the politics of land and body, the project reveals how systems of preservation often disguise mechanisms of control. Yet through ritual, sonic attunement, and collective gestures of co-becoming, the work imagines new forms of solidarity rooted in shared vulnerability. The fountain, formed by bodies and breath, becomes a site not of fixed origin but of ongoing transmission, where the invisible is not absence, but the presence of what has yet to surface.

Grant's report: 

A spotlight illuminates six glass objects on the stage which appear to be glass water jugs. There are two screens, one at either end of the installation, and the audience gather between them mostly sitting on the floor. One screen, a suspended fabric, shows images of water, the other on the wall, red hot coals, and glass being turned as molten liquid at the end of a metal rods. We see the line: beautiful words aren’t true. There is an image of water being emptied from a glass vessel by women, one older, the other younger, then the image of a flame superimposed onto waves which break against rocks. A voice reads out a text which refers to the sun, the moon, to seabirds, dolphins, rivers, and mountains. Meanwhile in the film on the wall a jug is being shaped, then the metal rods are cooled and the jug is immersed in a vat of water. To ambient sounds, the images on the two screens concur, and again we see the line: beautiful words aren’t true. Performers wearing white costumes manipulate the glass objects on the stage. This group interact with each other, writhing about then liftings and making the gesture of pouring water over each other’s heads, in what appears to be some sort of ritual. The lights dim, and the group settle, some lie down on the floor. The performance ends with one performer sitting crossed legged reading a text that describes a dream sequence. 

Barby Asante is struck by the beauty of the glass objects and seeing footage of them being made, and the use of them by what she assumes to be a mother and grandmother. She is curious about what came first. Was it the objects followed by the work that gets built around them? How did the different elements cohere? She missed the actual presence of water in the performance and wondered how that might have worked, in terms of the slippery messiness of water. How the audience would have experienced water for themselves. Barby says that she felt pain thinking about the history of enslavement and of how much death there were in the water.

Sandi Hilal loved the return to basics. But while she was watching the visuals, and looking at the water she was asking herself - who has access to water and fire? Thinking about Gaza. And what it will mean to carry the genocide through generations, from mother to daughter. She wonders if we can still afford to be so abstract. Because, she says, the water is where they are killing us. She says she felt a lot of emotions, but that she was also made a little angry.

Zairong Xiang liked how the audience was caught between the two screens, the water imagery and the formation of the glass through a fiery process. Something that is fluid, and then something that is in the process of becoming rigid. He agrees with Sandi that a future development could include the violence of the fire meeting the water, that a lot of imagery might emerge from it.