Overview

Within the scope of these online seminars, which we have planned to be ten weeks long and where we will share our research that we have been conducting since May 2022, we will try to read the testimony of stones, rocks, and ruins as non-human, more/many than human actors as a possibility of relating to the past, present, and future, to place the “ghost-presences” of the non-human in the context of critical peace studies, and thus, with this installation, to create a new perspective on the writing of the memory of social struggles in Türkiye.
As can be seen in the course outline we shared, the conceptual readings and discussions we will make will take us to the field of memory studies, different and mind-opening readings on stone, the literature of post-humanity that we feel comfortable with when we translate it as “not made up of human beings”, and Jacques Derrida’s ghost science. By intertwining these four fields, we will try to discuss stones, what stone hides, accumulates, loses and darkens, the moments when stones disappear and reappear, the moments when they shine, the life of stone and its struggle, generally by following the Turkish experience, with the help of news, visual texts and literary texts.

In Melisa Sönmez’s recently published text Small Round Stones (2022), Nergis says: “ What a beautiful thing the void was. To wander aimlessly and freely in the void without being caught by an obstacle .” And we, just as Nergis always did and will always do, will stumble over the stones in that void, and we will stop where we stumble and listen to the ghosts of Turkey.