The text you’ll read has been presented first at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden with the curation of Misal Adnan Yıldız, at the framework of Sarkis retrospective “7 Täge, 7 Nächte”. Upon the kind initiation of Umbau editors, it has been reviewed and revised reflecting the theme of the current issue.

When I was walking on the cobblestone covered streets of Fatih, the old city of Istanbul towards my grandma’s house, I remembered a bus, covered with hundreds of photos and their names. Unknown faces, unknown names—even with   pictures and  names visible, they were  still unknown to me. This bus stayed around the corner from my grandma’s for many years, until I started to learn how to read, ‘Ka-yıp-lar O-to-bü-sü’ (Bus for Missing People).

Twenty-five years later, in 2016, I am in Mardin at the faculty of fine arts, drawing flowers, looking towards the main road where armored vehicles pass by in the morning, ambulances in the afternoon. Cities are under curfew, civilians are forcefully displaced, my classmates are unreachable. 'I can't hold my camera; a special forces soldier tells me it's more dangerous than his gun. One day, my professor Evrim Kavcar asks, "What recurs in our everyday life?" Instead of giving the clichéd response about history, I check my smartphone and navigate through images. What repeats itself? What is the recurring one?'

On March 12, 1995, an armed provocative attack by the members of state related paramilitia on a coffeehouse in Gazi neighborhood, where the majority of Alevis¹ live, occurred. ‘Unknown’ perpetrators hijacked a taxi, killed the driver and opened fire to a coffeehouse, killing an Alevi dede², triggered an uprising across the Alevi working class neighborhoods of Istanbul  By March 15, 1995, 22 people had lost their lives and hundreds were injured and arrested as a result of the incidents that spread throughout the city.

On March 21, 1995,  communist teacher Hasan Ocak disappeared after being taken into custody following the events in Gazi neighborhood. His mother Emine, his father Baba, his sisters Maside and Zeynep and friends searched for Hasan for 55 days. On May 15, Hasan's tortured body was found in a common grave. Apparently he had been discovered by villagers in the Beykoz Forest five days after Hasan was detained. The search for Hasan's body turned into a human rights struggle for justice for the people that had disappeared under custody and for the first time, a group of around 20 people staged a sit-in in front of Galatasaray High School at the Istiklal Street, a key public space in Istanbul, on Saturday May 27. 

No slogans, just sitting in silence surrounded by the pictures of the disappeared ones. The inspiration for the Saturday Mothers were the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who gathered for the first time on April 30, 1977 at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the aparición con vida , the return of their missing, still alive,  people—desaparecidos. The people taken under the Operacion Condor³, perpetuated by the Argentine navy (Armada Argentina) and the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Their peaceful resistance led to the gradual dissolution of the country’s military governance and transformation to democracy. But more importantly was their persistence to reveal the truth about what had happened to those people, where they were and whether they were  alive or dead. Under state terrorism, the answer to those questions is usually rather expected or easy to guess, but what they achieved was opening up another possibility: alive reappearance  or in other words the hope and belief in their living. In that sense the state of being missing, always includes a possibility of being alive, due to this unknown nature.

The systemic crisis during the 1990s, led many governments to redefine ‘the state of exception’⁴ in order to be able to sustain their very existence. Nation states were losing their monopoly on power, most importantly their violence against armed rebels, secessionists, revolutionary cells and political movements. States all over the world, as well as Turkey, had to get out of their usual routines. This extraordinary tendency of the state, with its different apparatus of violence and repression, led its agencies to an anonymization. Security officers went underground working without badges, sometimes even changing their uniforms with those of guerillas, even fabricating stories to make themselves missing or dead.

Anonymity was not only a strategy for the state apparatus, but also for underground urban guerillas or the militants of various revolutionary organizations, which destroyed the state’s monopoly on violence. The militants who were not hesitant to effectively use armed violence, adopted strategies of anonymity, dissolving their identity in working class neighborhoods, high rise blocks of the gated communities, a tactic borrowed from RAF (Red Army Faction). 

We hunted for […] the apartment with one overriding criterion in mind: security. We had to be sure, when we rented an apartment that a variety of people could flow in and out […] without being noticed. Neighborly anonymity was imperative. Points 2 and 3 on our checklist were: prime transport links and the apartment’s direct surrounding… Everything spoke in favor of a high-rise… The desires… one normally harbors when searching for an apartment—such as a wish to feel at home — [did not apply]. The term “desires” was replaced by “functionality".⁵ 

The anonymity of revolutionary resistance pushes the state to confront the masses and choose targets not based on evidence of crime, but to fabricate their own evidence. This extraordinary reflex settles an extrajudicial regime, in which good boys⁶ are protected with systematic impunity, by the lawmaker. Anonymity not only protects the underground revolutionary militants, but it also keeps the hope about their destiny, unknown to their families or beloved ones.

When the Saturday Mothers arrived in front of Galatasaray High School, Istanbul, their silence was accompanied by the photos of the people who disappeared under custody. Those people were lacking visual representations, either because of the necessity of underground resistance or simply through the poverty in media infrastructures. What remained were passport photos, the obligatory visualization for identity registration. Between those two cracks, the image bares its ground zero, losing all the set of references and gains back another set of connotations. Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that, 'Photography is much more than what is printed on photographic paper, transforming any event into a picture. The photograph bears the seal of the event itself, and reconstructing that event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph.'⁷ Hence Azoulay proposes, if photography could become the base for a civil contract, recalling the event and redefining the relation, how could documents transform into occasions?

While the military attempted to make their victims invisible and anonymous by burying them in unmarked graves, dumping their bodies into the sea, or cutting them up and burning them in ovens, the Madres insisted that the disappeared had names and faces. They were people; people did not simply disappear; their bodies, dead or alive, were somewhere; someone had done something to them.⁸

The act of the Saturday Mothers to come to Galatasaray Square every Saturday, photos in their hands, sitting silently and asking about a specific event each week, has a strong performative aspect in public space. The act of a silent sit-in, without banners and slogans creates a power hard to demonize or terrorize by the state forces. On this ground, the photographs held in their hands are gaining an almost forensic notion, intending evidence for an event. But what makes this evidence even stronger is the people’s persistence. Despite all the conditions and suppression, they are  willing to emerge at the square, delivering their duty as a watch for truth and justice

There comes back the bus with the photographs. The state pushes for its own narratives, presenting itself as the only savior for all the people who look after the missing. It is presented  as an ordinary legal case in order to cover those people who disappeared under custody. Their tragedy thus intertwines with the state’s responsibility for people who disappeared under its legal responsibility. The bus of missing people does not reveal the truth, but rather covers it with its, in photographs covered surface—the missing people who are destined to stay  unknown.

The state's self-built and well presented image of caring for and finding the missing people did not work out and eventually turned into increased law enforcement in August 1998. Every Saturday police attacked, bludgeoned and dragged people on the ground and smashed them into police buses. They resisted for about a year. It was hard, especially in the climate of that period, where extrajudicial killings, torture and  forced disappearance were almost an everyday norm. 

During their 200th week, on August 25, 1999 the Saturday Mothers decided to take a break. Everybody thought they would quickly be forgotten. But instead they got even more public attention. It took them 10 years to be able to gather again at Galatasaray Square. I was no longer a kid. Now I understood to whom those photos belonged. Each Saturday, if I was in town, I would go to Galatasaray Square. Witnessing became an act of recognition, a way to anchor life in time and space.

How does one become a witness? This is a rather heavy question, particularly in an Islamic society, where ‘being a just witness’ is considered part of your servitude to God. The word ‘şahit’, the witness, etymologically shares the same origin with ‘şehid’, the martyr. Which makes the duty even heavier. The fairness of the witness doesn't come from a loyalty to objectivity, but rather a persistence and positionality towards truth. At Galatasaray Square, the press attention was excessive in the second period of the Saturday sit-ins. Thanks to the liberal atmosphere of the time, full of optimism through Turkey’s EU candidacy and the Obama-years, there was a belief that the state could confront its past and crimes.

When mothers sat on the square, they were almost detached from the pedestrians walking by Istiklal street, with a barrage of photo-journalists, tv-reporters, camerapersons and photographers around them. The crowd of optical apparatuses were actually disabling the public view on them. Their images were in circulation, but their presence was becoming invisible. 

The photographers were mostly leftist activists, who retired from their jobs and maybe revolutionary struggle, adopting this as a hobby in their rather late age. They were engaged to the cause, but still holding on to the alleged objectivity of photography and documenting the event every Saturday. I was between them at the beginning. Directing my camera towards the strong, pained faces of the mothers, I recorded their sorrow and persistence, their resistance and struggle. How much of this could my camera truly capture? I didn’t know. I only sought to document, adding a layer to my act of witnessing.

I really don’t know what happened, how I slowly shifted from the line of the photographers, to the corner of the banner and eventually towards the back of the lines. I wasn’t facing them anymore. We were shoulder to shoulder. Now I was looking at the cameras too. For them I was an object, but actually I gained the agency of the subject, to become one of the Saturday people. One week one of the volunteers handed me over a photograph of the missing people. I took it, grabbed it with my palm, squeezed between my thumb and my index finger. Do I remember whose photo it was? My position then didn’t allow me to look at the photo, but only its back, white surface. 

The photos of the people who disappeared under custody, printed in color on thick A3 paper, then covered with PVC for endurance, were carried in a big fabric bag each week, from the Istanbul office of the İHD (Human Rights Association) which is a couple of hundred meters away to the Galatasaray square. They are waiting stacked on top of each other, every week to be unfolded, to meet with the sun, air and the eyes of the people. Those who let them disappear, who didn’t ask for them, who asked for them after, who don’t know, who recognised them and many others. The prints were circulating between attendees of the Saturday sit-ins, collecting their fingerprints, adding to their patina. From ‘the open’ of Agamben⁹, to the wide-open truth. Photos have double faces, but they’re not hypocritical. They give those disappeared names a face, they return back their identity.

Dealing with political iconographies, questioning my mediums and repositioning myself from an observer, extractor to a witness brought me to a process of production of a new work. Responding to the question of Evrim Kavcar, found the opportunity to reflect on my perception of time and space, via this space of resistance and memory, Galatasaray Square. ‘Repetition’ has been created, reflecting on what reoccurs in my everyday life, navigating through visual registrations of it. What I document, what is evident to me. 

When I browsed the interface of the photo application, Saturday Mothers came to the front immediately. Remarking a particular time and space. It was like an internal clock and compass of my life. I decided to make a book from this collection. When it was exhibited for the first time in Istanbul at "Life, Death, Love and Justice" curated by Didem Yazici, at Yapi Kredi Culture and Arts located at Galatasaray Square, the Saturday Mothers came to visit the exhibition. After they saw their images installed as a , Hanife Yıldız said ‘We will celebrate when we return to the square.’ I never felt so honored in any work of mine.

At their 700th week on May 25, 2018, the governorate of Beyoğlu banned all public gatherings and demonstrations in the district, including Saturday Mothers, which had an exclusive status along the years, as after the Gezi Protests all Istiklal Street and Taksim Square were declared to no-protest zones. The Saturday people have been forcefully arrested. After a couple of weeks the sit-ins moved in front of the office of the Human Rights Association in Beyoğlu. It continued there till the start of COVID‑19. Considering the rather late age of the participants the Saturday gatherings moved online even continuing after the pandemic. After the ruling of the Supreme Court of Turkey that the ban of Beyoglu District was unlawful, on April 8, 2023 on their 941th week, Saturday Mothers gathered at Galatasaray again and were brutally arrested. The resistance continued for 30 weeks. Each week arrests, police violence and releases after health controls in a tiring rhythm for mostly elderly Saturday people. In their 971th week on November 4, 2023 they were surrounded by police but not arrested that time and since November 11, 2023, 972th week, they continue to gather at Galatasaray. 

During the review of this text, in their 1000th week, May 28, 2024, the Saturday people managed to gather again at Galatasaray square with hundreds of witnesses, supporters and journalists without police barricades and fences around the monument of the 75th anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. They covered the monument with their red cloves, layed down the big banner marking the 1000th week on the ground and raised the photos of disappeared ones from hand to hand. Being there in this historical time and space was an unforgettable experience for my personal history, but also for the recent historiography of justice and truth movements from Turkey, a rare moment of victory. The feeling of returning to Galatasaray square had a common understanding from another time, in which we can finally mourn the disappeared.

The witnessing act of Saturday Mothers, remarks a strategy to negotiate with anonymity as a form of resistance and suppression at the same time. Saturday Mothers fought against anonymity, which is adopted by the state combined with impunity, enduring a state of exception for their beloved ones who occasionally used anonymity as a tactic to be embedded in the masses and avoid unlawful targeting. This double layered facade embodies the regimes of representation, how they want to represent themselves and how they want to present the disappeared ones at Galatasaray square, in their gatherings. This act unchains them from the unbearable burden of obscurity of disappeared and releases the chains of representation regimes.

Footnotes

1. A heterodox religious community, synthesizing a liberal version of Shia sect of Islam with Anatolian humanism, excluded by the Sunni majority, oppressed from the Ottoman period till modern Turkish republic. ↑

2. Equivalent to an imam or priest, dede is a spiritual leader and community guide in Alavid belief. ↑

3. US and France backed plan to eliminate socialism across South America, with a series of coup d’états, counter insurgency operations, paramilitary activities, systematic kidnapping, forced disappearance, extrajudicial killings, torture and political repression from 1973 till 1982. ↑

4. Political concept developed by Carl Schmitt, to define hegemony based on the ability to rule the exception with inventend emergencies. ↑

5. Sigrid Sternbeck in Korpys/Löffler, Conspirative Housing Concept “Spindy”, 1998-2001, Installation. ↑

6. Said by the former president of Turkey Süleyman Demirel, during the 90's, for the state affiliated paramilitary forces and their unlawful activities. ↑

7. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Brooklyn New York: Zone Books, 2012, p.14 ↑

8. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts, Durham London: Duke University Press, 1997. p. 198-199. ↑

9. Giorgio Agamben, trans. Kevin Attell, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2003. ↑