Eyhan Çelik
COSMOS
During ‘Değiş Tokuş’, my project partner Aylin and I asked one another ‘what is home’ – a question -it turns out- that we repeatedly asked ourselves in our previous works. In one of his songs, Morrissey, asks “Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?”* He undoubtedly defines home beyond its physical qualities -its walls- and emphasizes the things we carry upon our shoulders. Just like the connection we see/make between our native language and the concept of home. In Kurdish lands, home is attributed a living character due to cultural predispositions, and it is a place of both complicity and temoignage. Then how can home, a space of security, also inhabit uncanniness?
The period where we discussed these issues and lended our experiences to one another assumed more depth with the analogy between the limits of home and language. My sense of home is rooted in being born in a multilingual household and finding myself away from my mother -in İzmir- at a very young age, surrounded by a language and culture unfamiliar to me. Repeatedly and for irregular intervals of my childhood, I found myself dropped off at my family in Ceylanpınar, then to be taken back to İzmir, which made me feel like I did not belong.
The reason I asked Aylin to photograph Koçer people, nomads in Karacadağ, stemmed from my interest in understanding what home meant to them. Since my childhood, the relationship I had with home did not include a sense of belonging, so home has been a non-place for me; but for Koçers, everywhere they go is home. The meaning of home is the state of being one with the cosmos that surround them. These two conceptions of home, which seem to be completely opposed to each other, transform into a duality that encounters each other at the point of not having a home, read roots, in the traditional sense. The reflection of home in this sense, and using the language of the photos Aylin took helped her frame transform into a wider space. And finally, the fact that Koçers' homes greet them wherever they go has evolved the image of home I had as a child.
(*) “Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?” (from the song ‘Home is a question mark’)
PROJECT TEAM: EYHAN ÇELİK (İZMİR) & AYLİN KIZIL (DİYARBAKIR)
