How did these 10 days go?

I spent a period of time away from the center and the pace of the city, keeping company with Kundura’s own time, both resting and losing myself in the archive. It was a process in which each day felt like two or three, and time expanded with the narratives and spaces I followed. Before taking over Vardiya, I had been thinking about settling into an archive and setting the archive in motion. As I wandered through the spaces and among the objects, I realized that memory and the archive settle into whoever watches and follows them. The images, objects and oral narratives that accumulated during this process also became part of the Kundura Hafıza team, with whom I had the opportunity to work.

Had you taken part in a program like this before?

Vardiya, in fact, was the first program in which I spent time in the memory of a place and had the chance to work in its archive. Shortly before Vardiya, I had taken part in a one-month program at the Water Mill Center in New York. WMC was a program that opened up space for thinking together about ongoing projects and newly sprouting ideas, drawing inspiration from its library and collection. Similarly, the Vardiya program offers an opportunity not so much for production as for drawing inspiration from Kundura’s memory, observing the space, listening to it and reflecting on the archive.

How did you feel when it was over? What had accumulated in your hands and within you?

I could say that I am continuing this watch, which I took over alone, by multiplying. The questions I was asking about memory, space, family and belonging have grown broader. I feel I have become part of an expanding sense of home and family, in which the stories and objects I witnessed define one another, the space and everything belonging to it, while watching over them. What I will watch over in this memory shift, and how, will also find its form over time; I could say that the Vardiya process is only just beginning.

Did this process create new possibilities, forms or prospects in your production practice?

I usually tend to work the images and stories I collect into fabric through stitching and drawing. During Vardiya, I recorded the ideas that came to me as a diary I composed from writing and photographs. It was a process in which, rather than sewing and joining pieces together, I listened, lent an ear to the space and wrote down my observations. I chose to add myself, with personal notes, to the memory of Beykoz Kundura, which has been formed through narratives and oral accounts.

In the diaries you kept throughout Vardiya, your relationship with sound in particular was striking. Could you tell us what that experience was like?

The factory whistle, which divided and determined time, is described as one of the main motifs of the neighborhood. The sound of the whistle, which woke people up, set the daily rhythm and called them back home, is said to have controlled the life cycle of the neighborhood like His Master’s Voice. Carried by the wind, the sound of the whistle was apparently mistaken in nearby neighborhoods not for a call to start the day but for an emergency siren warning of mortal danger. In the stories passed on to the archive, however, the loud sound of the factory whistle is remembered not so much as a nuisance but as a sound that held people together, a sound that is missed and still awaited today. Like glue, this sound holds together the shared perception of life and the shared time of the neighborhood’s residents and the factory workers. Today, too, it is possible to hear, accompanied by the narratives in memory, the factory whistle that wakes the working and living spaces of Kundura and calls out the time on every film and TV set.
And then, of course, there are the machine sounds we no longer hear. What trace, dust or sound remains of bodily production, of the movement of craft? Through the oral narratives in the archive, with their pauses and breaths, the machines have handed their voices over to the human voice.

How did spending time in the Kundura Archive resonate with / translate into your relationship with time and memory?

Before joining Vardiya, I had been thinking about the possibilities of settling into an archive through scraping, accumulating, multiplying and repetition. After joining the program, I realized that the archive seeps into you with all its narratives, objects and spaces. It makes you a reflection, a part of itself. During the Vardiya process, while gathering data from the archive through personal approaches and experiences, I found myself on a wander open to drifting, to encounters and to chance juxtapositions. The questions I asked, meanwhile, were shaped by the stories I followed.
Today, in the intricate structure of the factory, which opens onto different times and places through the narratives of films and TV series, we can see a reflection of a memory formed by stories that complete one another. In oral history work, the incomplete, unraveled stories that arise from differences in remembering and retelling take root in one another through the archive. The memory of the factory exists in a togetherness of spaces and times that, in a sense, lean on and are grafted onto one another.
Those who lived at the factory define themselves together with the people they worked with, and with their tools and machines. The structure of the Beykoz Kundura factory offers a form of family that opens from the personal to a collective becoming, bringing together people of different traditions, languages, faiths and origins beyond the nuclear family. The idea of being a large family united in a single body, with many mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts, where everyone looks out for and supports one another, lives on in people’s memories. Today, too, those who work at Kundura have an organic shift of their own, in which they look after every detail of their shared life and work processes and entrust their stories to one another.
Ahmet Bey, the exhibition guard, does not allow the dust that accumulates in the spaces to cover the objects of memory or distort their shapes. In this way, the spaces turn from production areas of the factory into a home. Ahmet Bey’s shift also contains a labor of looking after, cleaning and protecting the interior of the home, the nest. Perhaps the most important act that keeps a home alive lies in preventing the buildup of the damp and dust that seep into the lungs of a space.
In a sense, the factory stories that come together in Kundura Hafıza also make visible the mental and vital dust accumulated through different memories. These dusts of narrative, multiplying layer upon layer between the past and present of the space, open up an interface that connects times and places, a space of remembrance.

If we asked you to choose the object, record or photograph from the archive that affected you most, which would it be?

“Organizational Harmony: It is everyone acting individually and all together with a common motive.” Sign, Sheet Metal Depot,I followed the traces of women’s invisible labor at the factory, both in the workforce and in their daily lives. In the oral history work conducted with women, we witness narratives in which daily life merges with working life at the factory. In turning leather into shoes, joining the pieces together and forming the upper of the shoe is regarded as delicate work. Mostly women work in this section, known as upper stitching. With women’s narratives of work and daily life, such as the way different pieces and faces are matched like a jigsaw puzzle and brought together in upper stitching, the factory begins to turn into a home. Today, too, the re-mapping and gathering of the factory’s memory is being carried out by a team made up mostly of women.

I drew inspiration from photographs through which I reflected on leather as a space shared by humans and animals, and on its relationship with memory and with water, a vital necessity. I focused on photographs in which hides, whose faces and bodily forms were erased during processing, take on meaning through the expressions of the workers. For the covering that encases and protects another living being to be shaped for human benefit and turned into a second skin covering the human, the memory of the raw hide must be scraped away and cleaned; it must forget itself.

About VARDİYA;
The guest artist program Vardiya; Kundura Sahne’s experimental, innovative and research-driven approach to performance practice, together with Kundura Hafıza’s approach of seeking out local wisdom and preserving what has been lost, creates new spaces for thinking and encounter. It designs a sequence of work in which artists protect, look after and keep watch over the archive. Through Vardiya, Kundura Hafıza entrusts its archive to the artist who comes on shift. By granting the artist the authority to interpret, in the context of the principle of collecting and compiling at the heart of the archive, it creates a field of research through artistic practice and provides participation in and access to the archive together with artists.

In this working segment, which covers specific periods at certain times of the year, the artists invited to Vardiya hand over to the artist who will take the next watch at the change of shift. The artist decides how this handover will take place within the creative process. The concepts and practical formations that emerge from this shift-based system of work and research are presented in a program open to the public.