Unnecessariness and mirrors...

I never knew how was I accustomed to writing articles for Kekeme (Stutter), how would I suffer withdrawal symptoms if I didn't write. During an obligatory period of rest, I felt it too much. And the fact that my inner eye started to stutter while observing some events, some developments and what happen around them showed that said feeling turned into a reflex. In the meantime I skipped so many articles that I didn't know how to start this new period with Paralax.

This is the 55th anniversary of the atom bombing of Nagasaki, August 9. Yesterday a television channel interviewed me; while we were talking about my announcement entitled 'I Want My Mirrors', which you would see in the following pages, one thing led to another so I found myself saying that my hopelessness and pessimism on the future of this planet Earth continued, and that the Internet's significance as the most equal and democratic platform of communication would increase if it could preserve its original form and quality. Tomorrow I will be interviewed live on NTV, and I am curious to learn how many of the thirty or forty thousand direct subjects of my life will watch it at 8:15 in the morning.. I'm also curious how many mirrors will be sent to me until the end of November, how many subjects will not send a mirror despite they already read my announcement...A friend asked a few days ago if I enraged people so much so that some of them would dare to send a bomb to my post office box. I answered I didn't know. Are terrorists courageous?

In answering the questions asked by Ragıp Duran and Ilke Şanlıer, Noam Chomsky says (Virgül magazine, June 2000): "...Turkey managed to suppress the resistance within its territory in 1999. Therefore, it does not need to import weapons from the USA to commit mass murder, to destroy villages anymore. On the other hand, Colombia could not manage to suppress its rebels despite the fact that the USA has been training and arming the Colombian army and allowing the latter to use those weapons against its own people since 1960, before the fight against illegal drugs started. Now the rebellion grew to larger proportions, and the Colombian army is unable to suppress it. Therefore, the USA increases the weapons and training services it has been providing with Colombia. In a few days, the Congress will increase that support more and more. Thus Colombia will outrun Turkey and rank the biggest importer of U.S. weapons, because unlike Turkey, Colombia couldn't manage to suppress its local rebels."

Even some of the people closest to me commented my announcement and event of art entitled 'I Want My Mirrors' was unnecessary, pointing out to my narcissism/exhibitionism. I didn't contend with the fact that the remaining majority of them did not agree with that negative comment, so I thought over it. I think what confuses their mind is that my project is very personal. It seems that I took a step so self-centered that their tolerance-based comments towards the people who provided bases for various periods of their lives might not be applicable for me. My affection and non-affection towards myself, quality and non-quality of things peculiar to me, and the definitions we developed for the affairs of life are all based on understandable reasons, so the way I am can be defined as that my courage and fear stand at equal distances from me...

Many years ago, I had turned my eyes on a certain decision-making process of a woman who was and will always be very special for me. After having experienced many things for a long, very long time, she wanted to look at everything and everybody -which and who she might have left behind now- with eyes as clear as possible, and emphasized just one value for the steps she would take: "I must be fair. Towards everybody and everything! Before I set off on a journey with new choices..."

In my opinion it was impossible to do so. No, I did not oppose her idea because I lacked the notion of fairness. I just thought where there was choice, it was impossible to act fair...That witnessing and opinion led me to a project that never proceeded beyond the conception stage. I placed that woman in the middle of a room filled with transparent forms symbolizing hundreds of objects and subjects, having a closed window and a closed door. She was transparent too, but our eyes could notice her reflections refracted behind those layers of transparent forms because of the edge lines which I somehow painted in orange.... Arrows were flowing from each and every object and subject surrounding her, which that woman who wanted to be fair with clear eyes, and I had inscribed some sayings on the tablets (also transparent) standing where the arrows stopped. So I was assigning some definitions, positions and situations to those objects and subjects by taking into consideration that woman's existence -as I knew it-, her aim of fairness...In order to provide the people, who I thought would stand around that room which I thought I would be able to realize and exhibit, with a choice which I thought they would read and understand, I was emphasizing the same value: I must have been fair towards everybody and everything! When that woman called at a choice where fairness is impossible!

In my opinion, a dark, deep and irregular pathway lies between this project, whose theme is not me, for which nobody, even those who were close to me thought to define as 'unnecessary and narcissistic' and the 'I Want My Mirrors' project.

However, there is not even a single choice which I am about to call at. I am at a point of zero where I had selected everything I could select, where I had made peace with every other thing I could not select but I could not give up on, in spite of all tiredness and unhappiness arising from that failure. Was I fair enough? I don't know; if I was, I could have only been adequately fair, under the shadow of this question.

What does it mean? What does it call from life? If I knew the answers to these questions, would I have wanted my mirrors? Believe me, I don't know the answer to even this last question, while I am perhaps wasting your time with my unnecessariness.

Radiation seeps through our ears and façade walls of our houses into our brains now. Nagasaki cries for what happened 55 years ago. Every day every TV channel shows the 'changing southeast region' of Turkey; somehow every image has a general caressing the hair of a little Kurdish girl. Half of the Colombian people rebel against the government. And I am watching with astonishment 5000 thousand audience members packing Açıkhava Theater in Istanbul, listening to Buena Vista Social Club's concert, singing their songs together with them by heart, and waiting my 'mirrors' to arrive with the tranquility of sensing I am doing the most political thing of my life.!

I am welcome.

Hakan Akçura
(Article by the artist, published in "Görsel Kültür Arşivi" ParalaX on 9.8.2000)