Earth as a readable text
Walt Whitman once said the real war would never have a place in history books. When he inspects the actual home, a man understands that realities are frequently very different from what we have been made to watch and even read.
During my travels, I was told in almost every country I went to that it would be hazardous for me to go to the following country. For example,because of these rumors, I could not gather the courage to cross the border to Mexico, even though I lived on the San Antonio-Mexico border for three years. With time, as I saw the prejudices people held against my country, I started to think that they could be mistaken. After that, I was leaving ties behind in countries that I arrived in, filled with prejudices. This was the meaning behind the visibility of the rocks and ropes that I use as metaphors in my pictures.
I do not want to think of myself as if I was in a chemical test tube with many reactions, but we are what we eat, drink, inhale, and experience. When you eat a fruit, it becomes a part of your body. Researching is like eating fruit for me. The foods we taste in the places we go to become parts of our organisms. We chew and digest some, and we spit some out. Songs we listen to, scholars we know, and the sorrows we face also become parts of us. My art is not only my creation. I digest what I read and learn, and they become a part of me. My interaction with other cultures, ideas, and artworks creates it. Let's think that the space between us and others is completely made up of atomic particles carrying energy. We can see the emotional interaction that takes place in a short timeframe.
And in actuality, every one of us is being rebuilt repeatedly by our consciousnesses. The abundance of our materials determines the durability of our skyscrapers.For example, Africa, which could be called the "cradle of civilizations," is presented as an undeveloped country needing help, as if it did not have a history. According to a map prepared by scientists, Africa is much bigger thanis shown on our maps. Notable works by living artists artworks from Africa are exhibited as anonymous works. Today, works of art need to be exhibited in more democratic settings. Books about the history of science and art should be written with more detailed research since being scientific is prejudiced when complete data is not preselected and becomes when comprehensive information is not present.When separated from intuition and emotion, science and art become very cruel. There is not much difference between the desire for domination of today's people, who open the doors to space travel and want to form colonies in space and the ancient people who built towers in Babylonia to shoot an arrow at God.
Goethe says in the era of superficial knowledge, "A person who cannot consider their 3,000 years of history is a person who lives from day to day." Jostein Gaarder, who pondered over the avoidance of living day by day, compares people to parasites in his book, Sophie's World, to parasites that dream of finding a humid and safe place to live in for all eternity in the fur of a rabbit. Only children and those who think can gather the courage to face the magician holding the hat in his hands.There must be a connection between Sophie's magician and "the magician" from Carl Gustav Jung's third archetype, in which he explains today's reflection of our subconscious. Jung contributed to science with his archetypes in the 20th century. In his book, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette have divided into four parts, 1. King, 2. Warrior, 3. Magician, 4. Lover, the third archetype, the magician, points to the people of our time. The Magicianarchetype establishes dominance over people using the power, wealth, and status granted by knowledge.
The Magician archetype has captivated humanity with its advanced level of knowledge, technology, and illusions and dominates their lives, consumption habits, and beliefs. The " shadow " magician is the most dangerous type of magician that humankind has yet to encounter. Humanity can only save itself from the sovereignty of the shadow magician through an encounter with the "Lover," the fourth archetype. The lover archetype possesses aesthetic knowledge; it can read a human like a book. It can feel other people; it can feel their emotions and pain. When the magician archetype, which is consumed by knowledge, meets with the lover archetype, it will advance in artistic, intuitive, and emotional aspects, finally become virtuous, and form systems centered around letting live. By courtesy of this unity, people will be able to reach not knowledge brought by the mind but scholarship and wisdom.We may think everything is fictional when we read science-fiction authors like George Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Guin, Clarke, and Asimov. Stories with happy endings bring comfort to all of us. However, science-fiction works warn us about things we may encounter in the future and should be considered beacons of light. The time to steer the wheel has come.In the past, when reading the dystopian works of Jack London, Kafka, Burgess, and even Arendt and Popper, we would be told that one day, imperialist and totalitarian systems would come. Still, we have yet to dream that they could become a reality. Whereas, according to Bauman, as a result of modernity, the promisesof dictators about liberating the world and taking it back to the old days have always come out empty. Humanity has experienced incredible pains with wars, totalitarian regimes, and genocides.
History has allowed some to climb to the top only so they may fall the furthest and teach humanity a lesson.The shadow magician labels, separate, buys, stereotypes, and insults us, then destroys our ability to dream. Art returns our self-hoods to us and presents us with the opportunity to look into all humanity from the openings we have made in our cocoons.The other and the sceneryIf I go from Heidegger's scenery or picture (Bild) association, the world is nothing but identifying with the scenery. Instead of admiring the view, the people who grab onto the roots and limit themselves are mere land speculators. A man identifies not with the lands he lives on. Still, with the scenery, he looks at and the piece of land he sees empathetically because, in the scenic world, he will misinterpret the search for origins and roots, fall into the fallacy of seeing himself in the center of the world, and reject all others, drawing borders.In actuality, if one wishes to destroy a place, it is enough for one to put walls or draw borders around it. In the olden days, the locals that lived on the Solomon Islands would surround trees they wanted to cut down and whisper bad words to them in unison. They believed that when they did this, the souls the trees carried within them would leave, and they were right. Sometime later, they could topple each dried-up tree in one blow.Magic and spells are a regular part of life for the people of the Maasai Tribe. They would draw borders around unhealed wounds with ink pens, which they believed caused the damage to dry up and disappear quickly. In that region, these borders are also drawn for disliked groups. I once witnessed such a camp of children in Tanzania, along with the inhumane treatment people were subjected to merely for not looking like the others. It was as if the doors of the thick walls built around the lepers in Iran and China never opened to life. Forough Farrokhzad brought attention to these villages with her movie; The House is Black; she took one of these children in and gave their humanity back to them. In our day, there are over 200 villages of lepers in various places, all surrounded by thick walls.I saw the most prominent example of this in the Apartheid Museums I toured in South Africa – drawn borders established the places black people could live. The hidden borders drawn for white people by those seeking vengeance for the past are visible. Dreaming of revenge for the past helps no one. Arguments over who died in more significant numbers also benefit no one.
Our real fight should be to become humanized and to become a small circle that adapts a collective consciousness. As Paul Ricoeur says in his book Memory, History, Forgetting, "what does the forgotten want? -the forgotten wants to be forgiven." No longer will the problems people face be the concern of one region but all of humankind.Of course, there are also the borders each of us draws for ourselves. Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmet had covered up the mirrors he was exhibiting with red veils. This is a part of eastern culture and is a tradition that is still upheld in the villages I had lived in because constantly encountering one's reflectioncan result in losing touch with one's reality, just like when Narcissus lost his emotions and died as result of the extreme admiration he had for himself. A narcissist takes root wherever he is and turns into a plant. If we cannot communicate healthily with our surroundings, we will take root within our borders and dry up in our cocoons.
Albert Einstein summarizes our duties and responsibilities by saying, "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe'..." The consciousness that experiences one's self, thoughts, and feelings as if they were separate from those of others is an optical illusion. This illusion is a prison that limits our desires and the sense of familiarity towards the "other." Our duty is to expand our compassion chambers to embrace nature and all living beings with their beauty and free ourselves from our cocoons.