Artist Statement:
Fal (Fortune of a country) is a 7-minute, split screen film regarding the history of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus narrated as a Turkish coffee fortune reading, made for the degree show in my final year at Reading. The film is presented in a specific setting/atmosphere of a psychic café, created with props from the film such as a humidifier or Turkish coffee cups, as well as chairs and dim lighting.
Montaging of found footage shown against the ghostly representation of TRNC as a person is a reminder of the de-facto state of the country and its inexistence throughout the world. The presentation is influenced from my own experiences visiting the fortune tellers who usually work in run-down cafés with a lot of angelic imagery and strangely Islamic references, even though Nihat Hatipoglu (a famous theologian) claims that it is wrong as nobody apart from God can know what the future will bring. I was very inspired by Marcus Coates’s film Journey to the Lower World (2004) as he also uses superstitions – or rather religion in his case – to resolve problems of a community.
Inspired by Yael Navaro-Yashim’s talk at NiMAC in 2017 entitled Violence and Spirituality: Evocations of the Mystical Khidr in the Shadow of the Syrian War, the existence of superstition without religious or ethnic affinity conceives a sense of togetherness in Eastern Turkey. Navaro-Yashim described the belief of Khidr, a mystical creature who roams around the world in disguise to bring good luck and wellbeing to its believers brought together a variety of communities in Antakya, Hatay and other Eastern parts of Turkey bordering Syria, Iraq and Iran as Khidr did not belong to one or the other branches of Islam. The use of Turkish coffee becomes imperative as this is also a shared superstition/tradition between the three communities, similarly to Khidr; even though it is not as common for Greek Cypriots, the shared heritage from the Ottoman period carries the superstitious legacy of coffee fortune similarly to the Turkish and Turkish Cypriots. The cryptic and somewhat detailed language fortune-tellers use invoke a feeling of empowerment and validation in the shape of apposite memories in the visitor as the usual conclusion is that everything will resolve “uc vakte kadar” (in three days/weeks/months/years – not very specific with time).
Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) is relevant as the fortune-teller can be as an ignorant master encouraging the visitor to obtain the will to learn through ‘explication’ instead of didactic transmittance. In comparison to Joseph Jacotot, the fortune-teller is ignorant to the personal matters of the visitor, yet she is able to provide some beneficial guidance through her own methods. The equality of intelligence between her and the visitor, TRNC in this case is a form of representation intending to show the surreal equality of intelligence between the politicians who hold as much wisdom and admission as the fortune-teller. Future of TRNC is a mythical expectation through vague guidance as the politicians are not trustworthy anymore due to the never-changing dissolution no matter who is Prime Minister.
Exhibition View:
Artist influences:
Marcus Coates
“Historically the shaman would have been brought in to solve the everyday problems of a community. In this case, the anxiety was about how residents’ lives would change after the demolition of their flats and their relocation.”
“‘I took the ritual and occasion very seriously,’ Coates remarks, ‘but i didn’t want to take myself seriously, because I wasn’t in a position to. It was up to the audience how serious the event was. – They laughed all the way through.’” https://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/artists/9-marcus-coates/works/1559/
Fortune Teller, Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, oil paint, 99×131 cm, 1594
Something Different, Vera Chytilova
Fiction Documentary
This is a great film showing two women who have similar lives and problems being somewhat controlled by men in doing things that they do not want to do and how they both react/protest and reclaim their lives by making independent decisions. Although this is not an actual documentary, the amazing cinematography and the scenes showing their daily lives add a documentary-like feel to the films because it seems to describe this is what women face whether they are successful athletes or housewives.
The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis
This is very inspiring because the compilation of found footage according to the narration is masterful. I realised after watching The Power of Nightmares series that the footage can be used to evoke emotion or used as somewhat foreshadowing to the events that will be covered in the rest of the documentary. I always used found footage to represent exactly what is being said instead of using imagery that will be somewhat relevant but more so aesthetically pleasing so there is time for the viewer to take in the narration. For example, the recurring use of the video of t he corridor (28:50) to represent the Straussian Team B instead of showing actual imagery of them having meetings is very good because it becomes a symbol specifically for this group and whenever it comes up it is easier to remember the previous information and to follow what is being said. Also, the use of the imagery with the birds and the sea when Curtis is talking about how Team B suggested the USSR had impeccable new submarine technologies that could not be detected therefore the whole of the American submarine fleet was faced with danger is very poetic because the imagery without the narration would not mean anything but when they are put together it is much nicer and easier to understand than using footage that exactly describes what Curtis is saying and the specific dangers that USA would be facing.
Editing inspiration
La Jetée, Chris Marker
The dreamy sequences of imagination and reality in Marker’s La Jetée is very inspiring and I would aim to achieve this in my film so that the persona of TRNC will have the same dreamy effect to show that the found footage is used as a representation of memory and thoughts instead of a visualisation of what the fortune teller is describing.
Was Wo (What Where), Samuel Beckett
http://ubu.com/film/beckett_what.html
Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda
This is a great documentary film which is very enjoyable to watch and covers a lot of subjects from homelessness, poverty, gender gap, as well as other rather personal stories. It is very inspiring because although this is not a style that I used before the editing is incredible in terms of mixing talking heads and other rather abstracted visually pleasing footage that only makes sense with the narration.
Alev Adil talk at TEDxARUCAD on the 13th of April, 2019
https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/31862
Alev Adil is a Cypriot poet who performed a part of her sound poetry as part of her Ted Talk. Her poetry was mainly sounds like ‘tump tump tump’, inspired by the Futurist artist F T Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (c. 1912). She discovered that Cyprus had its own language in the 4th BC became extinct and the only thing left from it a few words from a letter to an aristocrat. She argued that this could be one of the reasons why Cypriots have an ‘ugly’ accent, it is neither the perfect Turkish nor the perfect Greek. She also talked about how she used to sing along to Greek songs in gibberish as she didn’t actually speak Greek, and this was ‘a linguistic chaos’ which “made more sense than borders and war”. Her poem was beautiful because in the midst of nonsense words and sounds there would be some words such as ‘kebab’ or ‘what an what an’ which reads ‘vatan’ meaning ‘country’ in Turkish. This was inspiring for me because it gave me a new perspective on storytelling and using the nonsensical to understand politics because none of it makes sense anyway.
Another poem by Alev Adil:
Ecem Sınay 
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