Triggered: Eyhan Çelik
© Eyhan Çelik
Images and Text by Eyhan Çelik
This photo with the title "Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do" is Ready or Not, Here I Come! (2015 - ...) is a photo of my project. Ready or Not, Here I Come! consists of a series of photographs that has been running from 2015 to the present. I'd say it's a work I started by closely observing my mother in the rhythm of everyday life at home.
In 2014, I saw Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). These years correspond to a period when I became interested in feminist experimental cinema. I was fascinated when I watched Jeanne Dielman, and I couldn't get the movie out of my mind for a long time. You will remember the famous potato peeling scene of the movie; the director makes the audience feel the possibility of a woman committing murder while she’s peeling potatoes in the repetitive rhythmic cycle of daily life. Using similar methods, she continues to disrupt the scene, wandering around empty corridors and rooms with long plans that make the audience uneasy. The house ceases to be a sheltered space for us and turns into an uncanny place. As if trying to hear the ringing sound echoing in the ear in moments of deep silence, it consistently weaves an aesthetic that appeals to the senses throughout the movie and invites us to question the concept of home.
I can tell you that there is an intersection between what I felt in my process of realizing that I was involuntarily observing my mother, and the feelings that Jeanne Dielman made me feel after watching it coincide with each other. Like most women, my mother is a woman who could not fulfill any of her desires from her early youth to present, could not realize any of her dreams without giving explanations and information to anyone, for just because she wanted it, and during her life where she was responsible for herself, could not have option to choose or to be more exact, has been denied the right to choose the conditions in which she found herself. She has a life in which her domestic shift lasts for all twenty-four hours of a day, without even giving up her domestic duties and responsibilities or not performing any of them. She is obliged to continue the same cycle over and over again everyday, in a rhythm that does not limp. Now I want to ask this woman, “what is a house?” For her, “the inside of house is full of traps.” Can we think of home as something other than being a concept or a space surrounded by walls? "Is home a word or something you carry in inside you?" I tried to get further into the house, often reminding myself of this question. I believe that if we think of the body as a metaphor for home, we can more closely feel the space in which we live. In this sense, everything that has gained its place on our skins offers us considerable signs. As I entered the house here, I realized that I had begun to move the body out of the house.
We know that our bodily freedom is occupied by the sum of rules, regulatory practices, habits, traditions, rituals that have surrounded us in everyday life and became almost invisible. Our need for freedom and security vary, one getting ahead of the other according to the circumstances: for Zygmunt Bauman in his book Liquid Modernity states that: “Today's uncertainty and insecurity are manifested by liquid modernity. People who dream of freedom, when they really reach it, are horrified by the amount of dangers it contains. Therefore, liquid modernity breeds a longing for security rather than freedom. This, in turn, makes it necessary to renounce freedom for greater security.” As a result of this acceptance and restriction, and this subjugation, we ourselves begin to create a more subjective form of closure and siege by hiding, being hidden, closing-covering, putting it in shape, harmonizing ourselves on our own body. At some point, the differences between the violence we practice on ourselves and the violence, discipline, decency, closure that we are subjected to, begin to fade. We are beginning to normalize all these mechanisms and adopt ourselves to them.
In the photo series of Ready or Not, Here I Come! I try to underline a freedom in this sense.
