ruins talking back
cultural cleansing with architecture as its medium
2024, Documentary Film: 20 min, digital, OV, english;
2024, Documentation Book: Essay and documentation of the filmtrip, 150 pages
Please contact if you want to watch the film or read the documentation book.
Excerpt from the film
Filmstills
Double-pages from the book
ruins talking back is an artistic research that investigates the architecture of the Armenian past in Central Anatolia of the last hundred years, that are rendered invisible through the diagnostic frame. The project attempts to associate the past with today’s psycho-social and historical reading of Anatolia, and discusses architecture’s impact on spatial violence, cultural cleansing and dispossession with a critical acclaim on trauma, ideology, nationalism and historiography. Through analyzing the trauma aspect of ideological constructions and collective amnesia, the essay tackles the question of whether and how it is possible to refer and represent the altered or disappeared fragments of architecture and how historical trauma is interwoven in historiography and architectural writing. The journey book is a collection of site-specific research, archive pictures, diary entries, and collages with film stills.
The film searches remaining traces of the denunciated ruins and dislocated stones of the Armenian past in Anatolia. Accompanied by a train journey, the film associates the fragmented stories of the Armenians who were deported in 1915 with today’s psycho-social reading of Turkey, and discusses architecture’s impact on spatial violence, dispossession and erasure.