Baha Görkem Yalim ~ Regarding an Invisible Kite

Görkem's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lecture marathon, June 2018 was entitled Regarding an Invisible Kite

Summary

Görkem begins their presentation by expanding on the original question “How can we move together?”. The answer is that we are already moving together, Görkem says, and elaborates that the question wasn’t about synchronicity or harmony but rather about a form of consciousness required in this togetherness. “Moving together” is also informed by the power of abstraction, allowing for contamination. After this introduction, Görkem steps away and a film is projected. The first images show colourful lines in red, yellow, black, and light blue on a green background, perhaps marks on a gym floor. The image changes to horizontal stripes in different widths, all of them in different textures and colours, one of the two thinner stripes in the middle seems to be a fragment of a body of water, another thicker stripe filling the lower part of the image, resembles a concrete surface. When parts of human legs and feet move through the central part of the image, the stripes are revealed to be a promenade next to a body of water, tucked between the concrete floor at the bottom and a superimposed rectangle at the top, partly blocking the image.

A voiceover by Görkem starts with the words “let us begin by imagining together, let’s imagine somewhere, a particular construct, perhaps an invisible person, powerless but articulate. If you drown you can’t describe water, if you burn, you can’t describe fire”. The lyrical, melancholic narration moves from a person condemned to float on inflatable swan to Odysseus, the concept of home, a war-survivors chronicle, the separation between reality and fiction, throughout addressing and evoking feelings of loneliness and sadness. “Floating is an inclination towards absurd fiction, yet also a poetic gesture.” As we see footage of a lake, again obscured by a light rectangle partly covering the image, the voiceover narrates: “Spending just four hours on an inflatable swan might be a piece of performance art and might as well move us immensely, depending on the weather of that day.” The titular invisible kite is, like the floating swan, an expression of “a desire for freedom” we hear. The kite, “swinging back and forth, forms a different story, a different version of the same”. The relative quiet of the film is regularly interjected with a loud noise, (possibly caused by engines, ventilation, or inflating of something), while we see the gym floor with its markings and a small rectangle, perhaps a kite, quickly moving down and up through the frame. The image is frequently inverted, then switched back. While Görkem’s voiceover describes potential invisible kites, their construction and materiality, and how they could be operated by the audience – we see yet again partly obscured footage, this time of a field, plants moving in the wind. The invisible kite and floating swan are equated by Görkem, for whom “their sameness reassures arts freedom”. The narration further considers art as freedom and likens freedom to fiction.

The film continues with more obstructed, abstracted footage of various landscapes – part of the sky, the sea kissing the beach. Slowly, people appear in the depicted settings, populating the gym. Four human legs are sticking up from the sea, the people’s heads and torsos submerged, invisible under the water. As we see reflected sunlight sparkling on turquoise seawater, the voiceover speaks of the curse of Odysseus, who’s imperative return home by boat over the Aegean Sea, becomes an agonizing journey during which he loses all of his companions. Fabulation, fictionalization, stretching and translation are mentioned modes of manipulation. Towards the end of the film, the voiceover is repeatedly obscured by the reappearing loud machine noise, now visually accompanied by a simple animated character using sign-language. Finally, the film returns to the gym, a blue plastic tarpaulin arranged over the gym floor imitates the previous image of the sea kissing the shore. The gentle, mellow, almost disaffected narration ends with the words: “The same sea has different versions. Like the invisible kite doesn’t exist, neither does justice in this world.”

Responses

Hypatia Vourloumis

Hypatia Vourloumis was intrigued by the emphasis on the intention for abstraction and how this related to contamination, which she sensed in the visual aspect of the film as well as its narration. She saw a collage-like aspect, with time and space moving in different registers. The question of abstraction made her think of Brian Massumi’s parables of the virtual and his attempts to think of movement, sensation and affect through abstraction, building on Deleuze’s notion of the virtual as a “what if”. She found the animated figure using sign language visually jarring, and though the film honed in on communication and the sign in these segments – as an “expression event” as opposed to abstraction – she has questions about how sign language is mobilized here as an abstraction. The violent, all-encompassing noise this “expression event” is overlayed with, made her think of the incapacity for rational discourse, a kind of rational public sphere of communication in the “Habermasian” sense. It seemed that Görkem was troubling the notion of consensus that can be reached in the face of injustice – which is impossible not to talk about but also unspeakable. She questions the mentioning of Odysseus, who experiences “a very different kind of loss of self” at sea.

A reference that came up for her was Derek Walcott‘s poem “The Sea is History”, and she reflects on the notion of the eternal in relation to the transatlantic slave trade, how current passages across the Mediterranean are part of this history of capital and colonialism. She also refers to Christina Sharpe’s book ‘In the Wake’, dealing with the different meanings of the word: the wake that a ship leaves behind, the wake is as the funeral, and also as a state of consciousness – this might be interesting to look at for Görkem. Something to consider is the way in which the images work with the language, and she wonders whether she’s comfortable with the abstraction employed, whether it feels possible (yet) to do this, considering the very specific movement, or inability to move, Görkem speaks about.

Maria Lind

Maria Lind liked the two images provided by Görkem, the invisible kite and the floating swan. “The thing with kites is that they are hard to get above ground”, filled with expectation and hope, but tricky to get to perform in the sky – instead, one ends up untangling a lot of string as she now is trying to untangle the film’s various strands. She cites the common advice to “kill your darlings”, but would rather suggest “keeping the darlings separate”. She would be interested in seeing Görkem explore individually the many things now going on simultaneously: the text and images, perhaps leaving out elements like the digital animation of sign-language – if they are still of interest, they could be explored separately.

Maria Lind found the text beautiful and speculates on the nature of the mechanical noise, this space with its “echo of emptiness”, but she questions, as with many previous presenters, the use of Görkem’s own voice. The film images she describes as powerful, reminiscent of the work of Zhou Tao, a Chinese artist who “lets the landscape and light narrate the story”, and in whose videos there is no human voice. The humans present in Görkem’s footage struck her as only peripheral, something that could be taken more seriously moving forward. She closes by remarking on the films intriguing tone.

Bassam El Baroni

Bassam El Baroni makes the connection between what Görkem has been writing and thinking about in the thesis and the work presented. The positive tone – “in the sense of a Deleuzian grounded tone” –he sees Görkem take up in a lot of the writing of the thesis, turns here in the work into a kind of Deleuzian nightmare, “Deleuze after some crack cocaine”. This interests him, as it captures the Deuleuzian “overpositivization” of agency, giving a twist on the context of the crisis addressed. This nightmarish quality is enhanced through the noise and the “jarring sign-language moment”, creating a feedback loop.

Bassam El Baroni shares that in Görkem’s thesis, “Ontology as Reverse Engineering” they allude a lot to Deuleuze, the notions of abstraction and contamination but also the thematic of the “geometric imagination of the subject”, which ties everything together. The architecture of the film’s different settings and elements remind him of the late Chilean artist Juan Downey and his work around language, its analysis through visual metaphors and construction of questions around agency, in a freshly postcolonial environment in the 70s and 80s. He feels the film is a complex articulation, at this stage a raw, unfinished version with a lot of potential. He found the incredible sadness and generosity in the attempt to find a way to construct things very moving. He likes the bitter sweetness of this honest project, which thinks about agency and shows the struggle around this process. It might benefit from the narration of someone like Liam Neeson, he says with a boisterous chuckle. Overall, he finds it “an interesting sketch for a film to come – which is very Deleuzian”.

About Baha Görkem Yalim