Merve Ünsal
Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one. These letters, which may take the form of (creative) writing, sound or visual essays, will be published weekly, from June 1st onwards. With these letters, we invite you to think with us about new ways of thinking about and through care, in these changing times.
This letter by Merve Ünsal, responds to Jonathan Hielkema's, which you can read here.
This tiny boxwood peapod (~4 inches) was carved in the 1500s. It opens to reveal little peas, and then those peas open to reveal little carved stories.” @AmeliaSoth on Twitter on May 27, 2020.
(To add another layer of dialogue into this letter, please listen to this sound work from November 2019, A Transmitted Dialogue, which plagued me while writing this letter.)
Addressing someone has always felt like an act of fiction—after all, the addressee is what I construct.
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And perhaps the time and place to not have an addressee in mind is this letter to a gentle stranger. Since I read the title of this series of letters for the first time, I have been drawn to the premise of this combination of gentleness and strangeness. After all, I overcome my strangenesses and estrangements through the gentleness of others. I then learn to bring back into my own gentle strangeness to and for myself—I learn how to be with me, through being with others’ being with me.
Not directing this letter to you, gentle stranger—although I have now typed out your name, as designated by the person who invited all of the participants/comrades into this series of works—is an act of caring. In beginning to care for others, I trace, delineate, make permeable what I am and what I want to become so that others can ooze in.
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Metonymy appears to be a species of metaphor, just as metaphor is a species of metonymy. Recall Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in the Poetics: “Metaphor is the application of a strange [allotriou; from allotrios: in Liddell and Scott, belonging to another, or foreign, strange] term either transferred [epiphora] from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy” (1457b; trans. Fyfe). The point I want to make here is that, in Aristotle’s conception, metaphor is merely the union, made explicit, of two terms which are already connected in one way or another. [1]
In writing and making, I transition between species, integrating that which is already in union in the landscape—a space and a place where bodies are cradled. The landscape is a body that embodies all other bodies. It reaches beyond physicality to create a home for language that describes and holds all directions and actions and reactions, it anchors my agency.
Making bare, explicit connections that are already there appears to be particularly pertinent now. The crises of narratives, visual, verbal, and everything in-between, resonate urgently—landscapes are bursting at the seams, holding acts of violence that had previously gone unspoken, unarticulated.
I have been thinking about the instrument of theremin in relation to representation(s) of violence. Theremin is a paradigm with which I could articulate the cohabitations and inclusions of land(scapes) and bodies. While playing the theremin, the musician appears to be manipulating the air with their hands. The “invisible” is what makes the music, the musical instrument. How do I contort and control the invisible and into what kinds of bodies? What does it meant to include or to host an implied body? Could I tackle place as an instrumentalized body while thinking about the instrumentalizations of my body?
Could the violence of fragmentation and fracturing of visual and verbal lexicons correspond to historic and social ruptures, discontinuities, and displacements, transforming the inherent violence of these actions to articulations of agencies? Could the/a materiality of images situate the political ethically and substantially as a response to this crisis of the narratives? Could we reclaim the aesthetic as an urgent and immediate political realm?
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In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (an incredible title that highlights the inherent absence of addressees), there is a coffin that disrupts, makes meaningless, pokes a hole in the narrative—and you only need one hole to breach a fiction. The form is not that of a dead body, but of a coffin. The coffin holds not death, but absence and the gap that is opened up by that void, disrupting the flow of the text, making readers aware that there is a text. The whole narrative is shaped by this coffin. It is as if all the words gather around this coffin, a perfect alignment of those six lines that mark the coffin on the page.
The impossibility of translating or interpreting that coffin into anything but a rupture can be extended to the attempt to hold pain. I’m using pain and not pains here as the sharing of pains can only be made possible through bringing together different forms of pain into a pain, which can then become a mode of mutual resilience. This rupture is activated and not concluded through that which can never be fully said, shifting, transforming from propositional togetherness (sharing thoughts permeably) to active togetherness.
It is in pain that the liminality of the self becomes more clear. It is in pain that social bodies contract, the body of the landscape is jarred, and temporal bodies convulse. Our bodies are in a constant state of becoming, in and through pain.
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Landmine can perhaps be used instead of landscape. Scaping the land to mine, landmine as a method of reading and being with the land.
Crow’s feet plow the land, made fragile with metal fatigue.
Crow’s feet: In the Middle Ages, devices known as crow’s feet, which had four sharp prongs, were employed in combat. (Encyclopedia of United States National Security, Vol.1, p. 420)
Footnotes
[1] Matthew Gumpert, Thinking, The Ruin, p. 16
Merve Ünsal is a visual artist based in Istanbul. in her work, she employs text and photography, extending both beyond their form. Her work can be found here and her Instagram can be found here
Click here for Jonathan Hielkema’s letter, which came before, and here for Thukral and Tagra’s letter (which will be published on July 13th).
Many thanks to Manon Beury, Tudor Etchells, Emily Medd, James Medd and Melanie Healy, Rapolas Rucinskas and all those who preferred to remain anonymous, whose contributions helped make this project possible.
