‘A Walk down the Shore’: A visual geography of ordinary violence in Istanbul

Introduction

This study on ordinary violence is really about the common sense around routine violations of bodies in everyday life in Istanbul. If violence is routinely seen as an exception, then here I deliberately explore the ordinary through a focus on the routine circulation of bodies, embodied memories and emotions in everyday life. I will draw connections between ordinary sites of violence and present a visual research-creation process to examine where violence takes place and how it appears in the absence of catharsis, or an eventful event, in Istanbul’s hyper-polarised settings of construction and renewal. I propose ordinary violence as a framework to map violent memories as extended human material embedded in bodies and im/mobilising them in particular ways in everyday life. The primary aim is to examine violence as a mode of doing, that is as power to violate rather than as something that happens. This argument centralises the body as geographical scale and articulates individual bodies as sites of epistemic diversity to activate a non-eventful, embodied and situated understanding of violence. The visual methodology of the study also addresses the in/visible, non-/event dichotomies that permeate existing theories of violence.

Staying in focus with violence is a challenge because of its double-sided pervasiveness. Tackling it as a mode of organising social space (rather than an effect of it) is difficult because violence is ‘so indispensable that it almost immediately attains the status of common sense’ (Wenzel, 2012: 439). To displace both common-sense and event-based references, I examine the everyday, perceptual bodily experience of ordinary violence through the affects of harm and fear.

Because bodies are exposed to violence differently, my focus on everyday violations aims to energise an analytical field based on how bodies move and make sense of their mutual positioning in space (Angell et al., 2014; Cınar, 2005; Hammond, 2014). Within the complex emotionality of violence, fear is particularly important since bodies are inhabited differently (Ahmed, 2004) by specific violations perceived in particular ways. As I show through the narrative connections, fear involves places and objects and provides a means to understand ordinary violations within the spatial/embodied configurations of everyday life.

The discussion is based on smartphone photography, video footage and visual elicitation with 15 diverse participants living in re-development neighbourhoods in Anatolian Istanbul. I then video-edited the material not only as an output form but as a filmic space in which to interrogate the dis/connects between the narratives. The visual ethnography enabled sensing and visually representing individuals’ different experiences of violence. The everyday technologies used in the study are considered sensory extensions of the self through which knowledge co-emerges and circulates in the form of remembrance. Hence, the speculative eventfulness of memories contributed to destabilising the event as an objective phenomenon. Memories’ complex status at the intersection of knowing, feeling and remembering, therefore, is a strategic ground for the study, as it effaces several boundaries between internal and external conceptions of bodies, minds, and emotions and opens up the extended socio-materiality of knowing/feeling/remembering selves to approach violence as a mode of doing. In other words, I am not interested in memories of violence as an empirical question (of validity). Rather, I rely on remembrance as the sum of narrative, bodily, technology-extended practices that enable a co-communicative ground to explore the relations between place, protagonists and knowledge producers of ordinary violence.

The exact location of the fieldwork, the Maltepe–Kadikoy sidewalk, is a structure based on multiple landfills that have occurred since the1990s. The wider area of the nearby neighbourhoods has been undergoing 3rd–5th-generation re-development roughly since the 1950s. The situation is mostly one of massive construction, market saturation, bankrupt developers, opportunistic inter/national mass buyers, fear of displacement, eviction, harm, anger and contempt directed at various ‘others’, and, hope, nevertheless. Each generation of building in the area represents a phase that roughly matches the historical contours of the early republican neglect of Istanbul as an imperial legacy, the clientalist urbanisation of the 1950s, the Istanbul-led globalisation of the 1990s (Keyder, 1999; Keyder and Oncu, 1993) and the current socio-physical marginalisation (Pinarcioğlu and Işik, 2008) of the city under Turkey’s authoritarian democracy.

Ordinary violence emphasises the micro-constitution of difference and the different ways in which bodies are inhabited by fear. This micro-approach to making a case for violence as ‘power to violate’ runs the risk of essentialising violence and universalising Istanbul, Turkey, bodies, etc. as ‘victims’ of a distant and harmful environment. I address this risk by relying primarily on situated analysis as my mode of operation to avoid re-producing the universalising notions of place and space. This concern is also specifically reflected in my exploratory, rather than diagnostic, research design. The research questions, procedures and ethics are formulated to resist ‘locating’ (meaning agency, resistance) as a knowledge strategy. I rely rather on multiplying (vision, ways of seeing) to acknowledge violence as a prismatic social force (Khan, 2017). This open-ended strategy results in a composite big picture (i.e. the video output) of the interconnected sites where difference plays into how violence appears (i.e. through what common-sense relations of seeing and being seen).

Within the next sections, I engage these questions, beginning with a brief overview of the existing approaches to violence that prioritise its spatiality and everyday-life connections. Then, I introduce the research-creation methodology and present the research-activated practices and encounters around ordinary violence. In the next main section, I focus on individual narratives and present textual layers of connected memories of ordinary violence based on the video ‘A Walk down the Shore’. In conclusion, I summarise my main arguments on researching the absent geography of ordinary violence based on the reluctant, fearful, flickering dis/appearance of certain boundaries and bodies in Istanbul under renewal.

Spatialising violence

Above, I am looking at a mini-collage (Figure 1) of four images showing four individuals’ memories of violence taken at different times during fieldwork in Istanbul. They are smartphone snapshots taken in the vertical position and categorised as landscape when asked whether the photo was intended as a portrait or a landscape image. The attention to place in the tags #remains, #whatremains, #ruins and #fear, again by four photo owners at different times, bring them together into a single image to start this section on spatial approaches to violence as a form of power (to violate).

Human emotionality and the body are essential metaphors to represent the relationship between urban processes and mental states. A wide range of bodily metaphors and personifications, ‘scary’ (Kern, 2016), ‘fearful’ (Dirsuweit, 2002), ‘wounded’ (Till, 2012; Vargas, 2016), ‘traumatised and scarred’ (Eder and Oz, 2017), exist to make the case for cities as co-produced by routine, systemic violation of bodies. Yet, this relationship is not fully articulated through a critical scalar focus on bodies as geographical scale and individual emotions as sources of urban socio-spatial knowledge. Pain (2014a: 532) makes a similar point by underlining the lack of sufficient geographic knowledge on the ‘experiential, emotional and everyday dimensions of global terrorism’. She proposes a multi-scalar geopolitics of intimacy in which the site, instead of the event or magnitude, situates terror acts as ‘attempts to exert political control through fear’ (531) both domestically and globally. As such her emphasis on the intimate as an embodied spatiality offers ways for this study to explore the micro-geopolitics ‘of emotions as political forces’ (Pain, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b: 73) mediated across scale and via objects (Ahmed, 2004; Fanghanel, 2014) of Istanbul’s (half)built environment.

The bodily experience of emotions and memories is critical to articulate the intimate, immediate and routine geographies of ordinary violence in everyday life. Das (2007) theorises the ordinary as a means to address this gap between sensational, eventful violence and the repetitions of everyday life. Examining the way the world is perceived and performed by the survivors and witnesses of Partition era atrocities, she traces Partition through the effects of its trauma specifically through the ordinary sense of social doubt that permeates individuals’ actions in an intrinsically unsafe post-Partition world. Re-animating the everyday as an extended time-space of violence, Das aims to understand what it is like ‘to pick up the pieces and to live in this very place of devastation’ (9). Following Wittgenstein that meaning is co-emergent with the ways language is performed, Das elaborates on the permeating meanings of the Partition era. Yet, the event, that is the temporal and traumatic origin of her interest, namely Partition, keeps framing the ethnographic pursuit of ordinary violence through everyday performance. In other words, the focus on the ordinary in order to narrate Partition still follows the centralised geography and chronology of violence as an eventful knowledge category. Das provides crucial methods and concepts for a close interpretation of these unfoldings and violence-imbued senses of selfhood and subjectivity. However, her work coincides with the common notion of the everyday as the micro-realm where invisible phenomena such as violence can be made visible, in this case, through the Wittgensteinian meaning that can be un/re-covered through ethnographic methods and theory. The non-focus on temporality and meaning as pre-given categories in which to situate the politics of ordinary violence is where I diverge. Instead, I am preoccupied with ambiguity (Bendon, 2005) as a starting point to navigate the low-impact sites where violence is co-produced through the repetitive, mundane violations of different bodies and subjectivities.

Nixon (2011: 2) proposes ‘slow violence’ as a gradual form of harm that is almost impossible to perceive within the conventional rhythms of daily life. Similarly, ordinary violence ‘is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’. It is not ‘eventful’ (Kern, 2016: 446), nor is it part of the ‘24-hour news cycle’ (Wenzel, 2012: 439). Nixon also explains the critical role of stories as a means of human re-scaling of the long duress of harmful processes. This resonates with my emphasis on memories as a particular genre of life storying. Ordinary violence emphasises scalar and temporal multiplicity, memories and perception as important in unlocking the ways in which everyday violations become common-sense and separate from eventful violence.

To support this decentralised narrative of violence, I also draw on ‘minor theory’, primarily as a means to engage agency beyond contemplating it within a micro-politics of victimhood and/or resistance. Reiterating the above concern to learn from/through ambiguity, this position sidesteps an analytics of storying the everyday as the necessary resolution to expose agency and therefore to locate a politics of hope. Ordinary violence understood as power and process, rather, enables me to make connections between the liminal spaces where ‘fluid, situated, and embodied’ ‘subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities might be marked and produced’. The epistemic field of the ordinary interrogates such connections as ‘inseparable from—if not completely absorbed in—the mess of everyday life’ (Katz, 1996, 2017: 299).

Processual approaches to violence (Springer, 2012; Springer and Le Billon, 2016: 2) exist within the urban scholarship on Istanbul yet the term ‘urban violence’ remains under-theorised. Despite the widespread recognition that particular urban processes result in particular violations of rights, bodies and identities, violence in relation to the urban is activated by deadly climaxes, such as the Gezi uprising, anti-renewal resistances (Erman and Eken, 2004; Karaman, 2013; Kuymulu, 2013), previous phases of emergency law and recently forced-gentrification in the southeast (Secor, 2016, Lepeska, 2016). The major limitation of these references for my objective of displacing the common-sense status of violence is the pre-given status of urban agents as self-contained, centralised, potentially political subjects represented by bodies and/or identities however fluid these may be.

A non-linear micro-politics however prioritises the site and aims to discover the diffused positions visited and revisited by bodies energised and muted by everyday violations. Violence, in this sense, is spatial not only in terms of the extensive consequences of its effects, or what takes place in space, but more foundationally, as an organising force in the way space is processually produced across scale (Doel, 2017; Rydstrøm, 2017; Tyner, 2012, 2016; Tyner et al., 2014). Taking the ordinary seriously, hence, my aim is to think through the embodied geopolitics of everyday life as the domain of generating meanings and a slow reading of harm in both the events and non-events.

In the next main section, I continue to locate my coordinates for an embodied emotional examination of ordinary violence in Istanbul, this time by explicating the main processes of my research-creation methodology.

Visual research-creation

Research-creation integrates theoretical engagement with a creative process not only as a method to access suitable research material but as a distributed means of knowledge production in itself (Chapman and Sawchuk, 2012). After the fieldwork, I implemented video editing as the interpretive platform to apply a connecting logic to create a filmic net of memories, places and emotions. The methodology enabled phases of slowing down to reflect on connections between life experiences for politically saturated, over-burdened, polarised subjects. A slow, open-ended and simple design of activities aimed to create research as a hyper-sensitised platform through which to discover expressive uses of visual technology (rather than using it to ‘expose’ violence). The following sub-sections reflect these major phases of knowledge generation that culminate in the connections that I present in the rest of the paper.

Practising theory in the field

I arrived in Istanbul in June 2017 to carry out walking photography tours and visual elicitation meetings with people who lived/worked in the area and had various gender, socio-economic, religious and ethnic backgrounds. I had met these people through open Facebook and WhatsApp calls and referrals and by participating in walking-based activities offered by initiatives such as Karakutu and Curious Steps. By the end of nine weeks in Istanbul, I had collaborated with 15 residents between the ages of 23 and 69. For the smartphone photography tours, I asked them to photograph what they thought was related to a fearful moment or a violent memory that they had experienced or heard from someone or somewhere else as we walked. The participants also had the option to wear an action camera to record audio-visual information on pace, rhythm and direction. I met again with the individual participants to talk about footage and to discuss consent on the use of material as well as their overall reflections on the process. Both during the walks and the elicitation meetings, research tasks were intentionally as broad, simple and close to an everyday visual social media practice as possible to allow space for variations in casting memories, visualising narrative and co-producing knowledge.

It was not the best time to start a project on how different people remembered and visualised violence across individual, collective, private and public definitions of the concept (Degen and Rose, 2012). It was almost a year after the emergency law (OHAL) had gone into effect nationwide after the coup attempt in July 2016. There had been several terrorist attacks, and the daily rhythm of the city was routinely disrupted by the frequency and randomness of security measures. I also felt that it was probably the wrong time to ask people to spend time performing ‘suspicious business’ such as taking pictures, moving around with a wearable camera and sharing their fearful moments with me. In addition, ‘What memories? What do you mean by violence?’ ‘We don’t need to talk about memories’, ‘You don’t get time to have memories’; I was told in one introductory meeting, ‘There’s something new happening every day; we’re occupied, and our minds are over-burdened’.

In fact, ‘best timing’ became a recurring phrase (e.g. by ethics reviewers and participants) throughout the process, and it best describes the continuous concern regarding the tension between the perceived timeliness of the project’s intent to address urban violence in Turkey and the multiple untimely conditions for its execution. This tension between the urgency of addressing violence and when to address it – under what conditions – from the onset through the completion of the fieldwork re-affirmed my interest in sensing and making sense of violence as the power to violate. I knew that there would never be a better time because violence of various kinds and intensities felt almost like common sense to everyone with whom I had discussed the project initially. This ordinariness, in fact, was the core of my interest in Istanbul as a research setting because thinking of violence as ordinary enabled a framework to seriously consider variations within common-sense understandings of the norms and processes that are sustained by fear.

Defining the field location was equally not a straightforward process. I was reminded more than once in introductory meetings that the exact location of the study, the re-development areas along the shoreline, was ‘off’ and that ‘majestic violence is, in fact, happening’, in some ‘metrobus interchange’, for example, that would truly be ‘horrific’ and ‘good enough’ – and obviously ‘more appealing’ for my ‘violence project’. I anticipated such feedback from various audiences during the process, declined the well-meaning suggestions and went on to refine my non-indexical visual approach to ordinary violence.

Indexicality in the visual sense refers to a physical relationship between an object and its photographic representation and the truth claims attributed to the visual medium. As an embodied, institutional and systematised set of technology and practices, fieldwork is also a medium that may result in ‘high-definition’ claims around violence as defining the (truth of the) city. I responded to such claims by choosing a fieldwork location that enabled me to examine violence in everyday places and ordinary situations where it was less sought, such as the shoreline rather than conducting a forensic search for areas of ‘heightened risk’ (Awan, 2016). This location also enabled me to examine how fear and negative emotions co-exist and shape the therapeutic experience of recreation in the area.

I agreed that violence was pervasive but not visually self-evident. I was also convinced that the shoreline, one of Istanbul’s long-appreciated strips of safety and threat; self-care and self-awareness; landfill and construction; heavy traffic and walking, bicycling, picnicking and loitering; stray animals and humans; and re-/dis-located rocks and trees was the right place to invite a conversation to multiply the views of how violence appears in Istanbul. These appearances are reflected through the partial coordinates and bodily, material extensions of memories that include the site of the smartphone; of walking and movement; and of taking, tagging, sharing and commenting on photographs of things associated with fear, insecurity and harm.

When working with the individual threads of visual and narrative material, I utilised the horizontal work space of conceptual mapping and video editing. These digital platforms enabled me to experiment with the various possibilities of working with layers in order to edit a conversation on the textures and patterns of everyday violations. Specifically, working horizontally meant working with connecting themes rather than emergent ones (as in vertical elimination coding, for example). The process resulted in filmic textures (Figure 2) on varied experiences of ordinary violence in Istanbul and the final research video ‘A Walk down the Shore’ which forms the core of presenting visualisations of everyday violence in Istanbul.

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Figure 1.

Humans and others.

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Figure 2.

Filmic textures.

Travelling fear: Visual narratives of ordinary violence in Istanbul

– These things are huge; we’re surrounded by them. They look like dinosaurs, but we’re the ones who are going to be extinct.

A, 65 years old and relatively secure owing to his lifelong experience as a teacher with friends, family, a pension and a flat co-owned with his wife in one of the newly developing neighbourhoods, felt himself surrounded by cranes that looked like dinosaurs – a kind of threat that reminded him of the space and class boundaries that divided the city by the condominiums built for the view as he felt himself becoming invisible by displacement. He was accustomed to walking in the area from the days when he was employed, even though he now visited it only occasionally because the place where he currently lived was ‘very far’. However, that would change ‘once the expected metro line is open, probably at least in two more years’. When A first heard about the focus of the project on visualising memories of everyday violence, he told me about the teens coming from the then shanty homes near the E5 (motorway) to where he was teaching in one of the first schools ‘up there’. For him, Istanbul’s re-development history was a story that could be told by generational tides of south–north movement, of displacement and invisibility. As he told the story of these middle school students, he was taking pictures of cranes, as did nine other participants (Figure 3 Cranes).

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Figure 3.

Cranes.

The sensory atmosphere of construction in Istanbul in general is intense. During our walks, participants often pointed in specific directions to show the visual contrast between the dynamism and scale of structures on land and the flatness of the sea as a way to emphasise the contrasting sensory environment of renewal. This contrast was photographed to articulate various fears around displacement, poverty, marginalisation and death by earthquake.

Re-development, re-constructing higher and denser structures, is intensely commodified, especially in the middle-class neighbourhoods that fall between the shoreline where we had our walks and the bordering E5 motorway to the north, which had been a sharp line between them and the former slum neighbourhoods populated mostly by working-class migrants. The shoreline is also a major recreational area where fear, risk, belonging, joy and self-care co-exist, creating a complicated emotional and physical atmosphere where fear of harm and self-awareness are integral features of a walk by the sea – although, as I will explain, these features differ depending on ‘who you are and where you are’ (C, 37).

A’s fear of displacement expressed as extinction (Van Dooren, 2014) connects to another participant’s memories of ‘stone rain’ and being banned from playing with the local children. B lived at the nearby rock mine with his father, who was a driver who hauled truckloads of rocks to fill the land on which we walked that day. They were then living in barracks with other miners, all men and migrants without families, and there was a ‘division of labour, just like in military service’ (B, 39). ‘Somebody was responsible for the key where the explosives were stored’. ‘It used to rain stones’ after each explosion to mine the rocks. The stones would sometimes reach the neighbourhood, where ‘they weren’t allowed to be seen’ as ‘boys without a mother’. He then showed me the types of rocks and dynamite holes (Figure 4 Rocks), differentiating them by their circumference and depth, and explained how ‘the rubble from the Anatolian side in the 80s and 90s’ filled the ‘crater’ in the former mines that we know today as upper-class gated communities (B, 39).

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Figure 4.

Rocks.

This conversation then reminded me of a series of garbage-container images by another participant. Other participants also depicted garbage, but we had discussed it mostly in relation to land and waste management. The series by this woman had images of both empty and clean and overfilled containers, and it too had to do with explosives – specifically, the fear that ‘a bomb might be placed in there’.

She was in Ankara when Ugur Mumcu, a journalist and political critic, was killed by a bomb placed in his car one morning in 1993. I remembered that too. She ‘somehow has the idea that the containers are unsafe places’, and ‘to this day keeps her children away from them whenever they are in a public place’ (C, 37). I told her that I had a similar sense ‘coming from I don’t know where’. Pictures of garbage bins displaced, distanced and multiplied our shared memories of how to avoid absent explosives by staying steps away from litter. Eventually, by the end of the fieldwork, I ended up with more pictures of containers, boxes and other things that involved a potentially harmful cavity (Figure 5 Cavities), expressed in terms of a shared conception of ‘blind terrorism’ and deadly harm (D, 66; E 29) and providing in/sight into how certain things and bodies are energised through violence while others are made invisible.

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Figure 5.

Cavities.

Blind terrorism refers to non-selectively targeting undifferentiated bodies. Its execution and visual impact rely prominently on brutalised bodies of things and humans as an objectified and generalised category of victims. Blind terrorism was effective in articulating the relation between memories and perceptions of terrorism as an ethico-visual relation of seeing and being seen (targeted versus generalised) while at the same time implying an ableist relationship between the unseeing and the unknown as well as the monstrous, or the Cyclopian. Fearful invisibilities, therefore, are strongly related to cavities, including garbage containers, corners and nooks of civil architecture (Ristic, 2014).

Fear of machines, specifically trucks and cranes, is extensive in the narratives. Bulldozers, cement mixers and trucks are dangerously loud, while cranes are huge and visually dominant. One participant identified them as ‘the gallows of the city’ (F, 23), in this case the city personified by the half-finished tall buildings standing side by side in a construction site – especially when viewed from a distance, as we did from the Kadikoy–Maltepe shoreline to face the newly built complexes in the deforested hills, former military land and displaced slums.

Trees as political objects were central to many memories, especially for some participants who had been actively involved in the Gezi protests in various cities and mentioned the ‘all for a few trees’ discourse in the places we toured (G, 36; B, 39; H, 27). One participant specified her experience as ‘anxiety’ whenever she ‘saw any fenced (enclosed) green area showing an information label saying “here’s under maintenance, development, etc.”’ because she thought it meant that the place would no longer be ‘open’ and public (H, 27).

Fear also travels through empathy and is extended and intensified by witnessing others’ vulnerability. Narratives of animals, those that were astray or formerly housed in/near a renewal project, depicted humanised details of ‘being drawn into homelessness’ and ‘having the right to a decent life in the city’ (H, 27; A, 65). Animals were implicated within an affective politics of hope and practice of inter-human and interspecies solidarity that is equally an identity-producing performance through petting, feeding, watering, sheltering, worrying, policing and connecting along the shoreline, at street corners and through social media interaction to house them and generally provide medical and other care.

Participants’ connections with these urban others echoed a humanised sense of agency (i.e. having rights) or involved faith-based interpretations of unity and why caring for animals was an indispensable aspect of being human and being good ‘because they, too, exist, and they are watching’ (H, 27). Through juxtapositions of victim and witness positions, fear travels between human and animal bodies through claims of care and empathy. As such, being fearful becomes a moral practice that is socially re-produced on social media and in the hollows of rocks, bricks and volunteer-initiated plywood animal shelters.

There were more graphic stories of work, life and death in the construction site, namely ‘truck terror’, as Sule Idil Dere’s mother called it when she campaigned in protest after her daughter was killed by a truck while taking a walk in a major park in Kadikoy in 2016. Several participants pictured her memorial in the park, and without an exception, everyone I met shared their knowledge of further stories involving harm to pedestrians, bikers and construction workers. I was offered pictures of another place taken by a participant when a deadly truck accident had happened in the street where he lived. ‘It’s not an accident’ he said; ‘it’s worker killings, construction terror’ (J, 41).

We were not able to see the photographs he had taken then; they were supposed to be in his cloud storage, but he could not find them. He explained that he had shared them on social media in protest of the ‘local municipality, of everyone’. The unfound snapshots marked the accident but did not necessarily archive its memory except in our physical and narrative revisit of the site of the street where the accident had taken place.

We took many detours during our walks to avoid blockages, dust and noise. However, another issue of concern was the gendered visibility of our bodies in the masculinised, militarised spaces of construction ‘barricades’ and safety ‘barriers’. Construction sites in Istanbul can be physically semi-accessible public spaces due to the loose implementation of site safety regulations. However, they are exclusively gendered spaces of material, performative and stereotypical masculinity expressed in terms of physical power and brotherhood. Workers’ accounts of these sites as an ‘impasse’ (Secor and Linz, 2017: 568) and as a shared space of solidarity in the face of a bleak and potentially deadly future (Akyol, 2013) bring into focus the complex intimate geopolitics of the construction site for workers and passers-by.

Gender affects the experience of urban encounters, and memories inhabit fearful bodies. In relation to the celebratory and affective politics of encounters and ‘living together’, one participant questioned whether ‘all encounters are good’ and answered ‘not always, … depends on who you are, who they are, where you are’ (K, 37; A, 65). Based on the knowledge obtained from our walks and reflections, gender emerged as the connection shaping people’s lived experience of fear. Gender-fluid and female participants could easily relate to the central concerns of the study of fear, violence and place. Their references to harm through a connected and periodically updated knowledge of others’ stories were in this sense more fluent. Female participants were also more self-aware and concerned about wearing, holding or hiding visual equipment as part of their tactics to control bodily visibility to ensure their safety. In fearful places, safety becomes a gendered duty (Hengehold, 2011), including, for various participants, the site of this research in terms of its intensive everydayness under emergency law and perpetual psycho-material renewal by construction.

Gender also played a role in participants’ visual practices, namely using digital zoom as a means to avoid a perceived threat by viewing it from a distance. Women visualise the ‘remnants of men’ that are ‘everywhere’, ‘even when men themselves are not there’ (C, 37), from a distance. The remnants are everywhere and are constantly being made in the securitised sites of the phallic megaprojects constructed by men living, working and losing their lives in the shanty barracks of the construction sites (Akyol, 2013).

One male participant explained how place makes a difference in his encounters with the Turkish flag, whether there is one flag or many on a residential building or where the building is in a particular city or neighbourhood (J, 41). The location and materiality of the flag, its frequency and temporality, all mattered in judgements of its meaning in terms of personal safety and bodily tactics of looking, not looking, speeding up or slowing down. The flag is a marker of the relative mapping of safe zones. However, ‘whose safety is it?’ asked J. Displaying the flag on windows and balconies is a spatial and visual performance of political territory, of both harm and survival (e.g. nationalist homophobic violence in Ulker Sokak in the 1990s). The displayed flag is the site of an intimate geopolitics subordinated through militarisation; it is personal and collective at the same time. Speaking of safety in this context is incomplete without a close reading of violence and its mechanisms of violation and subordination through the visibility of objects and bodies.

Connected memories of harm and risk shape the ‘settlement of “people” in (individualised) bodies’ (Sjoberg, 2015: 75). Fearful bodies are produced in the context of gendered spaces understood differently from the suspects-victims dichotomy that typically ‘settles in’ male and female bodies and results in further divisions across age, race, class and geography (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015). Cranes and debris, broken glass and the smell of urine are sites of a violent urban geography charged by fear. Recognising the militarised, securitised masculine structures and performances of ordinary violence presents a context through which to examine whose fear counts in assessments of agency and collateral damage. The mytho-geographies (Smith, 2010) I present here are archaeological in terms of their socio-material focus on sites and objects, including memories, that become entangled in visualisations of ordinary violations in Istanbul.

Conclusion

The challenge from the beginning has been to ‘stay with’ (Haraway, 2016) and feel at home with the ordinary as a way to re-frame the generalities of power and violence. Departing from the centrality of the event aimed to reconnect violence with power and animate it as a normative force that organises social space with various under-/recognised, perceptual, immediate and long-term effects. My main objective has been to gain a non-eventful insight into how certain political and material urban processes are experienced as ordinary acts of violence energising certain bodies and sites in ways that mute others, above all, by fear. My first departure in this direction was prioritising bodies as feeling, moving, remembering and networked sites of knowledge generation. Perceiving violence as a mode of doing (‘to violate’) rather than as a form of being was a way to focus on the embodied complexity of harm in everyday life beyond the dichotomous frames of non-/victim and non-/structural. Such an emphasis on violated bodies does not invalidate the multi-dimensional harm that various other forms and frequencies of violence cause to individuals and groups within the scalar geography of patriarchal, colonial, capitalist histories. My stance rather displaced the inherent epistemic centrality of the spectral (violent) case that almost always predates our awareness and centralises our knowledge of violence. Hence, the visual ethnography presented a texture of ordinary violence interwoven with various kinds of human (and other, urban) matter, with cut-outs and fade-outs, starting from human bodies – what they know, feel and remember as violence. The experimental research-creation process, then, presented simultaneously an alternative view of the event, what constitutes it, and, what kind of spectral experiences are in question once bodies in movement, doing things, such as taking photos, are amplified as sites through which to make sense of ordinary violence.

Of particular importance is the emphasis that all places are ordinary, and inexplicit and partial connections are to be sought for a situated understanding of violence as a creative force in the production of space and bodies. A major implication of this approach is the perspective that micro-politics ‘is not synonymous with the subversive or the oppositional or the resistant’ (Anderson, 2017: 593), especially without situating the emotional trajectories in which bodies appear as agents. I adopted ‘research-creation’ as an experimental and practice-based approach to unfold these trajectories within the social and material organisation of the research atmosphere (Fox and Alldred, 2015).

Visual methods have a potential to explore such liminal geographies of restricted movement, under-/hyper-exposed places (Kawano et al., 2016) and muted bodies. Visual research elicits and exposes otherwise intangible, immaterial phenomena such as emotions and affects but also infrastructures, networks and memories (Rose, 2016). My engagement with amateur mobile photography and film, from image production to tagging and editing, explored the utility of these tools for a coherent, situated and expressive narrative of violence beyond the widely existing rhetoric of research images as representational, affective instruments to expose the absences and presences of violence. Filmic interpretation, specifically the layering feature of editing, provided a work space in which to visualise violent encounters beyond a methodology of exposure (Rose, 2016).

Focussing on memories creates the space of connected histories to trace how fear travels through bodies and things, re-produces particular movements and re-embeds them within harmful relations. Reiterating the argument on the ‘shared foundations’ and multi-scalar dynamism of violence (Pain, 2014a, 2014b), I presented the connected ways in which violent places are constituted via fearful bodies and through the construction of masculine, class and military hierarchies in everyday life.

The ordinary violence framework addressed the significance of site and non-linear scale as the key elements of a positioned epistemology of violence. Such an epistemology seeks to explore the mytho-geographical (Smith, 2010) by projecting layers of ‘geo-historical and bio-graphical configurations in processes of knowing and understanding’ violence (Mignolo, 2009: 160). This exploration means a much-needed reframing of violence as a creative social force, in this case perceived through the emergent visibility of filmic interpretation and situated within the extended materiality of a memory–emotion complex involving movement, distance and fear but also empathy and care.