Listening to “Ruins Talking Back”
written by Andrew Herscher
In contemporary visual culture, ruins are typically seen from one of two perspectives. From one perspective, ruins appear as forensic evidence – data that yield information about political violence, disasters, and other damaging phenomena. From the other, ruins appear as aesthetic objects – the triggers of “ruin lust,” to use a term that has circulated throughout the Western history of ruins, or the subjects of “ruin porn,” to use a now-common term. Each of these two dominant perspectives on the ruin involves a moralizing gaze. Perceiving truth, the gaze on the ruin as evidence is usually moralized positively; yielding visual pleasure, the gaze on the ruin as an aesthetic object is often moralized negatively. Neither perspective, then, makes the ruin available to an expansive imagination that seeks to understand the intertwined histories, politics, and cultures that produce ruins, conceptually as well as materially, in the first place.
Iklim Doğan’s documentary film Ruins Talking Back, offers another way to see – and listen to – ruins: a way to open ruins to the historical, political, and cultural imaginations that contemporary perspectives generally preclude. As Doğan tells us in the film’s narration, the film is an effort to “search for lost memories of the untold past.” The “untold past” that Doğan refers to is the history of the destruction of Armenian people and communities in the late Ottoman Empire. In contemporary Turkey, the narration of this history is officially regarded as an “insult to the Turkish nation” and therefore a violation of law – thus the status of this history as “untold.”
“Untold” is critically distinct from “unknown.” That is, the problematic that Doğan constructs in Ruins Talking Back is not that of recovering a history – a history that has been thoroughly researched and documented in parallel with and in response to its state-sponsored repression. Rather, the problematic is that of recovering the dilemmas, paradoxes, contradictions, and uncanny conditions that ensue from this history’s political invisibilization.
It is within this problematic that the ruin emerges as a profound and crucial artifact. Ruins Talking Back follows Doğan as she retraces one of the principal routes of the Armenian deportation, from her hometown of Eskişehir in Western Anatolia, the location of a transit concentration camp during the deportations, to the Syrian border, across which forcibly deported Armenians were displaced and massacred. As she tells us in the film, she rides on the Berlin-Baghdad railway, “on the same tracks that were used for the deportations.”
The abandoned castle, dilapidated graveyard, and other ruins that Ruins Talking Back present to the viewer are not mere evidence corroborating a history that, while contested by the Turkish state and its functionaries, is nevertheless well-known. But neither are these ruins mere imagery that foster the viewer’s ahistorical aesthetic experience. Indeed, some of the ruins documented in the film do not visually appear as ruins at all. An Armenian church converted into a mosque in the wake of the deportations initially appears as simply a mosque; another Armenian church, converted into a cultural center, initially appears as simply a cultural center.
“Their architecture became warehouses, graveyards, cinemas, playgrounds, and ruins,” we hear as Doğan begins her journey. This list points to a key feature of the film’s exploration of ruins: ruination is detected not only in a building’s manifest physical deterioration but also in other transformations, especially those transformations that require a historical awareness to register. With attention to changes in function, inhabitation, and identity, as well as physical condition, then, architectural traces of the destruction of Armenian life and lives are revealed across landscapes that at first seem completely removed from that historical disaster. In Ruins Talking Back, the ruin thereby becomes an interpretive device, a heuristic to access architecture’s material record of disavowed or repressed history.
In the course of the documentary, Doğan describes the way in which “architecture becomes an instrument to erase the past” – an instrument wielded by a state attempting to rewrite its history. These erasures yield ruins in both the apparent forms of abandoned or dilapidated buildings and the hidden forms of converted or reoccupied buildings. Posed as a ruin, architectural instruments of erasure are revealed precisely as such – a revelation that discloses the manifold traces of erased histories.
In an essay accompanying Ruins Talking Back, Doğan quotes the late British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, on the “twilight zone” between history and memory. As Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Empire: 1875–1914:
"The history of the twilight zone is different. It is itself an incoherent, incompletely perceived image of the past, sometimes more shadowy, sometimes apparently precise, always transmitted by a mixture of learning and second-hand memory shaped by public and private tradition. For it is still part of us, but no longer quite within our personal reach."[1]
Ruins Talking Back poses the ruin as a way into this zone of enigmatic yet decisive history. Keeping faith with the zone’s incoherence and incompleteness, the film refuses the twin temptations of reductive historical “clarifications” and equally reductive recourses to the negative sublime of epistemological impossibility.
Hobsbawm claimed that we all live in a twilight zone between the historical past – a condition “open to relatively dispassionate inspection” – and the past that we remember as part of our own lives. Through the journey that she documents in Ruins Talking Back, Iklim Doğan offers a uniquely compelling documentation of the spatial formation of the twilight zone that she inhabits, as well as a provocation to all of us to explore the twilight zones where we find ourselves, wherever we happen to be.
This provocation could not be more timely. In a period when, across the globe, homelands are being consolidated by violent expulsions of populations of people who, we are told, do not belong where they are, our ethical response should put into question these homelands as political objectives. Attending to the violent expulsion of people from which one modern state produced itself, Ruins Talking Back is just such an ethical response. The film concludes with the consequence of this response: “While living the rest of your life, broken like this, you have to struggle to make yourself exist in this foreign place.” Listening to ruins, that is, will ruin us. In so doing, however, this listening will allow us to begin to comprehend how it is not our neighbors that are foreign but rather our homelands themselves.
[1] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 5.