A Walk Down the Shore| Sahilde 1 Gezinti

‘A Walk Down the Shore’ ¹ is a 19-minute video produced as part of the ‘Visualising Memories’ project. Alongside this commentary, the video is a standalone research output and the core platform arising from the processing of the visual-, textual- and movement-based (walking) material generated during fieldwork undertaken in Istanbul in 2017.

The main research project focusses on people’s connected memories and perceptions of fear and harm in familiar settings in order to understand how violence appears in everyday life. ² It has a strong methodological emphasis and visually engages the epistemic entanglements that result from the differential, at times competing and conflicting (technical, embodied and social) affordances of everyday technologies used in research – smartphone cameras, wearable cameras, video sharing platforms, and hashtags. As such, the video integrates these technologies as methods in themselves that raise important questions on how things and subjectivities become in/visible within an expanding system of research-based vision.

The video output is a filmic collage that follows the logic of interweaving partial connections between the audio-visual fragments of narrative on fearful memories of ordinary violence. Emotions as the embodied, lived experience of such memories often include place-related fear, threat and anxiety, and travel within an affective economy ³ of things and bodies with various subject positions. The collage is thematically based on these connective threads that were identified by paying close attention to the circulation of e/motions (in place and in narrative) in memorialised, habitual avoidances and preferences for certain ways of moving in the city.

Watching the video, reader/viewers will be looking at an ambulant filmic ethnography of how violence appears in Istanbul presented in eight spots – theme units, pieces of video – that connect participants’ encounters with things, human and other bodies, machines, animals and others in the built environment. Our steps, senses and reflection on memories centred on machinery, workers, and dust and noise as a way to reflect on the politics of ongoing displacement and processes of intense renewal of the residential stock in Istanbul. The brutal architecture of the unfinished high rise – its militaristic organisation and masculine performance with safety barriers and barricades, barracks, uniforms, helmets, and visible physical power attached to anonymised, male worker bodies – was the sensory environment that connected and situated memories and phone-images of a wet, old magazine, a broken beer bottle and cranes as memorials of fear and loss. The video is a filmic narrative of these archaeologies mobilising, multiplying and blurring the distinct definitions of urban/state/domestic violence for a situated speculation on how fear travels and inhabits bodies, what visibilities are at stake and what theories of violence unfold from the cutting, stitching, and layering of these in-proximate yet intimate geopolitical stories.

The ordinary violence framework in the project seeks ways to sense, situate and mobilise ambiguity as an atmospheric element that surrounds a multi-scalar yet non-hierarchical geopolitics of violence across the body and global. ⁴ Under-recognising ambiguity and effacing it as a dimension in how violence is lived and perceived retain focus on violence as an event, as something that happens that can be framed and transferred by its pre-empting conditions and inevitably referential to a normative temporal presupposition: non-violence. Shifting focus to the forceful entanglements of bodies and things in everyday life, the video activates a non-eventful approach to violence and introduces a non-normative, situated temporality. It does so first and foremost by giving place to ambiguity, by presenting a hyper-sensitivised narrative on the various pressures of volumous, space-taking and action-loading, ambiguity on particular bodies travelled by seismic waves of emotion ⁵ in places charged by differential histories of harm.

The video is empirically based on the audio-visual material produced by residents living in redevelopment neighbourhoods in the Anatolian part of Istanbul. Field research included wearable camera walks, smartphone photography and visual elicitation meetings. Together with 15 participants, our practice involved phases of ambulatory reflection, situated ‘mis-guidance’ ⁶ and speculative visualisation in order to explore the intimate geopolitics of ordinary violence in Istanbul. As knowledge co-producers, we were loosely organised in the mobile photography tours and later in the visual elicitation meetings. Participants were informed that the project was about visualising place-use and memories of violence and well-being. But they were free to interpret these relations within personal emotional frameworks such as ‘aggression’, ‘fear’, ‘safety’ ‘feeling good’ and ‘terror’ in the city. During the walks, they took pictures of what they thought was somehow related to these e/motions in their immediate environment along the Kadikoy-Maltepe shoreline in Istanbul.

Participants were also asked to wear a body-mounted GoPro camera to better understand the bodily dimension of individual movements such as hand and body positioning while taking a picture but also to get a sense of individual rhythm, pace, and the stages of entering, acting on (framing, shooting) and exiting a photographic scene. Paying attention to the stages of each photographic object was an important aspect of the project’s focus on visual practices and specifically on the smartphone’s meaning as a digitally extended site of human emotionality and sense-making.

In the visual elicitation meetings, co-producers reflected on the material and discussed their various meanings and significance. During these meetings, co-producers were also asked whether they would share a particular image on social media, and if so, how they would ‘tag’ or ‘caption’ it. In this fashion, a layer of textual input along with oral and audio-visual content was added to the material. Consent for the use and distribution of visuals was processual (i.e. both gradual and unfolding in each participant’s perception, embodiment, concerns, and implementation of research tasks). Permission for use was confirmed for each audio-visual clip and photograph.

Post-fieldwork iterations of the narratives led to the identification of videography as the most suitable mode to develop a dialogic and convergent (rather than interpretive and read-only) engagement with the material. Socio-material affordances of the editing software, namely, the horizontal and layered spatiality and time-based ⁷ workflow of Premiere interface enabled experimentation with sampling and remixing. ⁸ This, in turn, allowed for a sensitised examining of the intensities and tonal variations that resulted in filmic surfaces of ordinary violence. This process of editing and re-editing and paying close attention to what happened to ethnographic material through the intra-actions ⁹ with form (i.e. videography) aimed to work with ambiguity rather than resisting its presence. ¹⁰ Therefore, in the current iteration of the video, this ambiguity is ambient and appears through the use of layers, rhythm (visual and audio), colour and sound in order to create a screen-surface of partially connected bodies marked, divided and rendered visible by ordinary violence.

Videography in the project also problematises the role of memories in enabling and disabling particular cartographies of ‘I’ and ‘we’ as they frame everyday encounters with others. Memories, here, are understood as live and extended, (embodied, digital) human matter that mediate through bodies and visual technologies in emergent relations of sense-making in everyday life. Convergences between smartphone and wearable camera footage and digital video contribute to understanding the role of these technologies in the biographical embedding and interweaving of individual and collective memories of both eventful and non-eventful, ordinary violence.

All of these currents of stylising the material are within a wider stream of practice-based research ¹¹ which eventually merge with the wider ecology of epistemic diversity. The video is in this sense part of a wider agenda on ‘cultivating care and attention’ ¹² through expressive knowledge practices on the intimate geopolitics of violence, in this case, by designing a knowledge experience about the differential temporality and spatiality of violence as lived and felt through its social and psychic effects in Istanbul.

My horizontal practice of partial connections and examining digital sediments in order to create a filmic surface using layers, further, draws on situated analysis and feminist objectivity ¹³ (Haraway, 1991). I explain what these mean in the overall process of research in the project elsewhere; ¹⁴ here, I just want to clarify that consistency in the making of the video means taking ‘data drivenness’ seriously – to the extent that the material itself is intangible or non-existent for anyone beyond the participant, and sometimes, even for the person in question. Videography provided me with the resource to work systematically but flexibly with such moments of disruption, physical obstruction, indecision and confusion without reducing these to questions of legibility. Instead, sense of threat and sediments of ordinary violence, their social and psychic effects, spatialised in filmic layers with the aim of sensitivising viewers to the disciplined anticipation (in terms of flow and rhythm) on how to visualise violence; what it is expected to look like, take place and for whom in a specific context. Layering in audio-visual friction, in specific terms, problematised the symptomatic, causal, eventful theorisation of violence, especially in the face of misplaced objects, ambiguous bodies and amplified subjectivities. I find this an important epistemic moment and a departure from the pervasive field of ‘exposure’, that is, of making things (in this case, violence) visible (in this case, via visual technology/methods/data) towards a material-driven exploration of style and expression as under-acknowledged dimensions of academic visual practice.

An ethnographic film is a unit of reflection, rendered often following the read-only logic of cinematographic storytelling. I identify the video as ‘filmic ethnography’ as opposed to ‘ethnographic film’ in terms of its focus on derivation, transmedia convergence, and exclusive use of participant-generated material originally not intended for film. The video is a remix in the sense that it itself is a derivative work using the existing, finished smart photography created, eliminated and conceptualised by participants during fieldwork. More precisely, the fact that most participants found their involvement in the project and performance of field activities ‘artistic’ (even though this was not my framework of presenting the project or the tasks at any point) led to remixing as my preferred post-fieldwork mode since the material was already a curated collection of finished works (and had never been ‘raw’). Hence, the resulting filmic ethnography is potentially a read-and-write product since it theorises itself as one of the many possible thematic and aesthetic iterations and its form remains open to edit, rearrangement and remix. The narrative is soft – its digital form enabling fresh possibilities for it to be re-shuffled and re-told.

Cutting film is an act of releasing energy by creating surface. Cutting a material body into pieces disrupts its bonds. The video renders violence as a prismatic interface and identifies the importance of ‘points of contact’ ¹⁵ where mediation, memory and transformation take place in the filmic workspace allowing new opportunities to discover new meaning, sensory experience and possibilities of what violence in everyday life looks like and for whom in Istanbul. These relations of cohesion and exclusion (across meaning and ambiguity, surfacing and cutting, knowing and not-knowing) reflect from the prismatic surface of the video and, at the same time, map the borders across the academic, mobile phone, laptop screens on which this work is produced and circulated.

Supplemental Material

video_stills – Supplemental material for A Walk Down the Shore| Sahilde 1 Gezinti

Supplemental material, video_stills for A Walk Down the Shore| Sahilde 1 Gezinti by Asli Duru in Cultural Geographies