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Eray Çayli, "Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan" (U Texas Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
Ugh.
- [00:01]
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Dr. Erai Chaile
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Dr. Ronay Bakan
New Books Network hi everyone. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Ronay Bakan. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Erai Chaile to discuss his new book, Earth Moving Extractivism, War and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan. Earthmoving explores how extractivism operates in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are more widespread spread than ever. To address this seeming contradiction, Chile focuses on northern Kurdistan in the 2000 and tens, a period when the tensions among peace, war, capitalism and colonialism were particularly palpable. He demonstrates that colonial and racialized practices of extractivism continue to function not only through the physical movement of Earth, which displaces bodies, fossils and water, but also through affective and sentimental modes that move people emotionally. Through his collaborations with local artists, Childo also shows how colonized communities generate their own anti extractivist visions, visions that break with most of valuation, that reduce colonized and racialized bodies and geographies to quantifiable or marketable terms. Erai, welcome.
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Dr. Erai Chaile
Thank you so much, Ronay, for taking the time to talk to me about my new book. Your own work on the spatial politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the exact same region I discuss in the book has been urgent and inspiring for me. So it's not only a pleasure but also a real privilege to have this conversation with you.
- [02:18]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
All right. This is such kind words coming from you and your scholarship, but let's dive into the conversation as we both are so excited for this and have been waiting for this. Firstly, given the collaborative nature of this project that I know a little bit about, I was wondering whether you could tell us a little bit about how the idea for this book came about in the first place and how this kind of, like, unfolded over time.
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Dr. Erai Chaile
Absolutely. So this was not a book that I intended to write. It did not result from a conventional research project. In retrospect, the book can be traced to 2018, when I was invited by the Ahmed branch of the Chamber of Architects to coordinate a Summer school on their behalf. Amed, by the way, is the city that is the social, cultural, political heart of Northern Kurdistan. In Turkish it's called the Arbakr. And the branch of the Chamber rather of architects that I'm talking about here sounds like just any other professional organization, which it kind of is, but it's actually in this context much more than that. They are effectively functioning as something of an activist organization, I would say, as they are deeply engaged with issues around ecology and environmental politics. So they invited me alongside two others to coordinate this summer school. And this was obviously in the wake of the episode of war that the city had seen in the mid to late 2010s. The state, the Turkish state, carried out what it called a counterinsurgency operation which left major cities and town centres in Kurdistan, in Northern Kurdistan, devastated. And the branch of the Chamber of Architects, Namid, wanted to think critically about how repair or reconstruction could occur in this context. And whilst coordinating this summer school, I got to know further groups of creative professionals, architects as well as artists. Gradually. Actually, the venue of the summer school was an independent artist run space called Loading and its co founders, who are Genghis Tikkin and Erkan Ozgan, two contemporary artists, they invited me to become their inaugural researcher in resident, which was something that they always wanted to do. They wanted to launch this residency program. I accepted that invitation. So I ended up actually staying there for the better part of 2019. And it was through this engagement that I had close engagement. And Loading is such a place where I stayed there. I actually opened the place on a daily basis because it is very much, I suppose in western cities, what you call a co working space. It's an open space, open to young people, anybody who's interested in the creative fields of art, architecture. It's got a library, people can come there. Some artists use parts of its rooms as studios. There are events held and I was sleeping there, opening the place every day, every morning so that people can use it. And that was really a priceless experience. And all of the engagement with visually oriented individuals in the city actually led to this book.
- [06:46]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
Thank you so much. That is such an interesting story and it reads throughout the book how those engagements happen in such close contacts. And the context for that is so interesting and definitely reflects on the collaborative aspect of the book when we especially read the anti extractivist visions and how you approach them in your perspective, for sure. So my other question is that focusing on Northern Kurdistan specifically you developed this critical analysis of the aesthetics of racial capitalism and its counter Aesthetics. Could you briefly, briefly unpack the main argument for our audience and contribution of the book and explain a little bit further how the case of Northern Kurdistan provides a unique perspective for developing this analysis.
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Dr. Erai Chaile
So, as the book's subtitle indicates, it discusses the relationship, or I would argue, the interdependence between extractivism, war and visuality in Northern Kurdistan, and more specifically in 2010's northern Kurdistan. I approach this interdependence as a question of coloniality. And I take my cue here, especially from my interlocutors and collaborators, many of whom have spoken to me of Kurdistan as a case of colonization that has not even had the status of a colony. I ask what role cultural production plays not only in this status, less coloniality, but also in its undoing. And I explored this question with a focus on extractivism, because that's really the material mainstay of coloniality, and it has been so in many other contexts throughout history as well. Again, the period that I focus on is the 2010s. This was an especially turbulent decade in Northern Kurdistan. It began with de facto peace talks and ceasefires between the Turkish state and the Kurdish Liberation movement. It ended, however, with full blown war and a violent counterinsurgency campaign. During this period, images of violence spread widely alongside the violence itself, and violence became the subject of increasing interest in contemporary art, on social media, and also in mainstream media. So for me, this context is actually a microcosm of a world where environmental and humanitarian sensibilities have become unprecedentedly visible and widespread, while the injustices that they're meant to address continue to deepen. Now, again, extractivism has been central to colonialism and racial capitalism since perhaps the 15th century. The question is, how does it then continue to proliferate at a moment when sensibilities towards issues like extractivism, humanitarian and environmental sensibilities, are really, really visible. Now, I argue that extractivism proliferates, not despite, but precisely through these sensibilities. And that is to say that it engages these sensibilities in its own way. So if we want to challenge extractivism, what we must do is attend not just to sites of conventional extraction. And here I have in mind the mine, the gold mine, the plantation, the oil well, the mega dam, et cetera. I suggest we must also attend to two further kinds of sites. First, sites where the violence that enables extraction takes place, what are called theaters of war. And second, sites of cultural production, because it's cultural production that eventually determines whether and how violence and destruction are to be sensed and made sense of. So to return to your question of what is it that distinguishes Northern Kurdistan from other such contexts marked by extractivism, I would say this has a lot to do with the idea that it's a statusless colony. And here statuslessness might be understood in at least two interrelated ways. The first one is indeed quite literal, that this region was never nominally a colony, yet coloniality has surely been the foremost political force that has shaped its modern history. You could rewind this story to the 19th century. If not, it was back then already that the late Ottoman administrations used various population engineering techniques using Kurdish populations to kind of try and dilute non Muslim populations in, in this particular region. Later on, obviously you had the Assyrian, Syriac and Armenian genocides. Actually prior to that you had the Hamidian massacres, where again, the central Ottoman administration enlisted the help of tribal fighters, Sunni Kurdish tribal fighters, to target the region's non Muslims. So basically pitting one, you could say indigenous community against another, while in the process creating the very categories of whose loyal kind of Muslim local population and who not. So this then obviously led to various, you know, much more obviously colonial processes in the aftermath of World War I. It's widely known that, you know, the nation states that we today have in the region, in particular Syria, Turkey, Iraq, were actually created on the basis of the Sykes Picot agreement. And there's nothing more colonial and imperial than that, Right? So I think this region, it's being shaped by colonial dynamics is certain. But the problem here is it's somehow hard to pin it down, pin all this colonization down. It seems to any kind of actor, right, we are kind of sure that this is a colonial context, but okay, who the colonizer is seems to be much less straightforward than, let's say the Americas or Australia, et cetera, the better known kind of colonial contexts. But statuslessness also is actually, if you look at the root of the word itself, state static. It's actually, I think what really distinguishes this context is the kind of lack of status, sorry, stasis, things are really, really dynamic, a lot more dynamic. I mean, even within the space of these 10 years that my book discusses, we went, you know, ceasefire peace talks to massive, profound devastation. And as listeners who are familiar with this context will also know much more recently there has been a renewed phase of peace processes and so on. So it's really, really kind of without stasis, this context. And I think that really makes it a lot more difficult, this kind of work of relying on certain kind of forms, taking this back to visuality, a certain way of visualizing the environment being ascribed. This kind of progressive potential is very difficult actually to take for granted in this context. So rather than relying on certain forms, certain styles of representing, imagining the land, the river, the environment here, what really this kind of highlights is the collective work that needs to go into and that needs to happen through visuals and that needs to go into kind of challenging and contesting coloniality.
- [16:09]
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- [16:37]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
Experian thank you so much. Era this is actually bringing up more questions or comments rather to mind, one being that the question about coloniality in Kurdistan has been an issue that is evident and yet not quite substantiated perhaps, but I think the shift from the categories of colonialism or actors. Your book does a good job of focusing on colonial practices by focusing on sensibilities, visuality and the relations with Earth. So I would add that as potential ways in which your book advances this conceptualization. And also I think another part of contribution that I see is that extractivism of racial capitalism often seemed almost like outside of Southwest Asia and North Africa, based on the relations in Atlantic Ocean or Indian Ocean. But yet the region that we are focusing about is the bridge between those two landscapes. And still racial capitalism and extractivism seemed out of context in a way. And I think your book does a great job of bringing those conversations and telling us how we can talk about these moments and historical legacies in the regions that seem maybe foreign to these discussions. Further ado Before I want to without further ado, I want to proceed with our third question, which you mentioned already, the kind of like emphasis on visuality, right? And in your work you take visuality as a register through which extractivism and counter extractive visions are articulated both during the years of peaceful resolution and during the return to war in the period of urban conflict, as you mentioned. And in particular you focus on the TV shows such as Bear Witness, which on the one hand contribute to hypervisibility of war, while on the other hand depict the conflict as one between PKK affiliated groups and vigilantes, rendering the state and its violence invisible. Which was to me fascinating because it was such an interesting way to put it. I was wondering whether you could expand on your choice of visuality as a primary analytical lens for examining extractivist and anti extractivist visions. And in relation to the example that you are using, bear witness. Can you explain how this approach might contribute or contribute, contribute or complicate our understanding of war and violence and its visibility versus invisibility and so on?
- [19:45]
Dr. Erai Chaile
So there's a vignette that I use in the book to introduce the centrality of visuality to extractivism as I conceptualize it. And this vignette is from January 2018. It's just months after the Turkish state's counterinsurgency campaign. Senior officials from the so called State Hydraulic Works Department, or DESAE as the Turkish acronym goes, are gathered on the banks of the Tigris river in Amed. DESAE is the state institution responsible for water infrastructures in Turkey. Dams, hydropower plants, river engineering. And it's played a central role in profoundly altering the environment in Kurdistan for decades, in particular through the so called Southeastern Anatolia Project, which really is about framing the question, quote, unquote, question of Kurdistan as a question of underdevelopment rather than lack of rights and freedoms. So the regional director is. The regional director of. DESAI is inaugurating a large embankment project along the Tigris. He is launching this project to the press on site. He's got architectural and engineering drawings being presented like artworks on a canvas laid out on easels. He explains that the river has been severely damaged by what he calls, and I quote, senseless water use and sand extraction. He says the damage necessitates, they say, his intervention. He says that they've got this new project now and it aims to achieve a bunch of goals that he terms in strikingly aesthetic terms. He says they're going to clean the river's dirty appearance, they're going to create a pleasurable view, and they're going to reveal the river's beauty at a higher resolution. And these claims in his speech are also repeatedly anchored in various kinds of quantity. For example, how much soil will be moved, how many machines will be deployed, etc. What he does not mention, of course, is how this damage occurred in the first place and the role that the state played in it. The fact is that the damage along the banks of the Tigris at this point, at this site in Amed, began in the 1990s when the first two major dams on the Tigris, Kralkese and Dyle Dam were being built. They had already started to be built. And concomitantly to this start of construction, the Tigris river, at least the first 100 or so kilometers that stretch between the headwaters in the north where these two dams were being built, and further down, also including Central Amed itself, was excluded from protection, coastal protection that had been granted to major coastlines in Turkey, thanks to a law that was passed in the mid-1980s, I think 1984, where Turkey obviously was neoliberalizing its economy. And this kind of created a certain tension between two industries integral to its neoliberal economy, tourism and construction. Right. So it tried to, I suppose, strike this balance by saying, okay, the coastlines will have to be protected from construction, et cetera. And these coastlines included major rivers as well as seas. But Somehow, miraculously, in 1990, an amendment was passed to this law that excluded the Tigris, or the first 100 km of it, from coastal protection. And this is what then really kind of led to a series of sand mines, sand pits being kind of opened along this 100 or so kilometer stretch of the Tigris. The river bank here, along this stretch, ended up being plundered. So this is how the damage came about. What we now have is the very actor that caused the damage coming up and saying, hey, we're going to repair it, and we're repairing it because we're interested in environmentalism, we're interested in repairing the environment, but also we're kind of framing our repair of the environment in these kind of markedly visual terms. And plus, we're then kind of using as a way of kind of legitimizing and convincing the public of the value of this kind of work of repair in quantitative terms. We're going to kind of repair this many kilometers of the riverbank, we're going to carry this many tons of matter, etc. Etc. So this is where the kind of term earth moving comes into play that titles the term that titles the book. There's a kind of, you know, the story behind this term or how I kind of end up conceptualizing extractivism as such. Involves a translation twice over, if you want. So I was really kind of thinking about what it might mean to write about extractivism in this particular context. I then actually realized that what's really at the center of extractivism in this context is this equipment that we call hafriat trucks. Now, hafriat is the Turkish word for matter that is kind of removed, dug up from the earth. And Hafriat trucks are obviously what are called earth movers or earthmoving equipment or earth moving trucks in the English language. Now what's crucial for me is that the same earth moving trucks that are involved in this embankment project that the Desae's director is now launching in January 2018 were also involved just months prior to this moment in removing the rubble from war torn city centers and town centres in Kurdistan, such as the very kind of center of Amed, its historic center known as Surici. And this rubble actually also involved, included human remains. And it was also dumped at a site not too far from the banks of the Tigris River. Right. So somehow I realized that really this kind of object, the Hafriatraks, are at the center of both war and so called repair. And a repair that is kind of really kind of visually argued for. And that is where I kind of came to first translate this kind of problem of extractivism into this context as Hafriat Shiluk, which effectively means the business of dealing in Hafriat. This is what half year trucks are at the center of. And then kind of translating this notion back into English, if you want, as earth moving. And as you said in your introduction, for me, this helps convey the interdependence between environmental destruction, visuality and war. Because earth moving trucks not only move the earth, they also move remains of violence, but they also move the witnesses of this violence. They are actually involved in this business of leaving. The witnesses of violence sentimentally moved in a particular way that aligns with a certain valuation logic, actually that characterizes extractivism. So basically, in a nutshell, the problem itself is visual from the get go. But I want to also finish by just saying that during my time in Ahmed, engaging with in particular, Loading. I have to say that visuality was also central to the work of regrouping in violence's wake the two individuals that founded. Loading. They are actually art teachers in the national education system. That's their day job alongside being, alongside having a contemporary art career as internationally exhibiting artists. And they had actually, during the state's counterinsurgency operations, they signed a petition, together with the rest of the members of their union, teaching union, teachers union, a petition against war. And this is why they were then expelled from their duties as civil servants. And that's when they decided, okay, we have to rent an apartment flat in our city. We have to gather all the others who are being kind of dismissed from their jobs because indeed there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of people being dismissed in this manner. And we need the space to regroup through art. We need to do what we know best, to use visuality to actually regroup and engage critically with all sorts of violent processes affecting our city. So that is the second reason why visuality is really, really central to the whole issue that the book deals with.
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Dr. Ronay Bakan
All right, thank you so much. I mean, there is also a lot to talk about, like the transformation of the cultural and natural heritage site along the river, including Hetzel Gardens, after the counterinsurgency campaign and how it coincides with this humanitarian sensibilities and promotion of rescuing or recovering the Tigris River. Because at the same time, we have seen the increase in, for instance, monocropping activities or encouragement of monocropping activities in Hafsa Gardens, which used to be a site of small scale gardening done by the residents of Surici, who were essentially internally displaced due to the state's counterinsurgency campaign. So there is a lot of connections there, for sure. My next question is, and you already mentioned a little bit, but engaging with the artwork produced in northern Kurdistan, you also ask whether or to what extent the artists that you work with can push against the regionalist frameworks often imposed by Eurocentric art canon, which tends to confine their work to local or quote, unquote, regional affairs, especially when they go and exhibit in international exhibitions, for instance. And this is a fascinating lens not only for thinking about extractivist practices and their aesthetic representation to me, but also for exploring the layers of colonialism, which brings back to the question of coloniality in the region. Right. And these layers of colonialism in the book, I think, ranges from global to regional to local, which continue to operate simultaneously, on one hand, through Eurocentric expectations around art. On the other hand, as you discuss in the book, through Turkish river management in Northern Kurdistan. I was wondering whether you could tell us how artists in northern Kurdistan navigate, resist, or challenge these intersecting modalities of racialized and colonial sensibilities in their work. And potentially, again, based on the kind of intervention that you are making in the beginning about coloniality or what we understand about coloniality. If you want to kind of like, go back to that question, that's also, yeah, up to you.
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Dr. Erai Chaile
So how they do that is in a nutshell, by rejecting both vilification and heroization. Right. So I think historically we have to also kind of think about how a certain idea of a loyal Kurd, a good Kurd, bad Kurd, distinction, has been produced from the vantage point of central administrations, whether that's late Ottoman. As I said, you know, already in the late 19th century, early 20th century, in terms of various kind of acts of violence against non Muslims etc, this was very, very present. But since then it has been present. You know, the terrorist Kurd versus the kind of Kurd that is hospitable, that is a kind of nice person, that is our brother, right? So there's a certain kind of statuslessness that cuts across that distinction, that kind of division between good and bad Kurd, and that kind of seeming opposition between, you know, a hero, a Kurt that is kind of presented as a hero versus a Kurd that is presented as a demon. And I think artists are particularly adept at kind of engaging with these kinds of, with both sides of this, of this equation critically, because obviously a lot of it is based on kind of again, ideas, metaphors, imaginaries. And this is exactly the territory of cultural representation. And the particular chapter you're talking about, I suppose is chapter two, where I discuss the work of Ahmed based contemporary artist Genghis Dickin. Again one of the co founders of Loading. And he is really part of the first generation of contemporary artists in Kurdistan. And I'm basically talking about in this chapter how these, this first kind of generation of contemporary artists struggled really to get a Western art world's actors to recognize them as contemporary artists. They were either, you know, dismissed as some kind of subsidiary group that is on the periphery, et cetera, that is kind of not, not relevant to the centers of the art world, or put on a pedestal as, you know, the heroes that represent the oppressed people of this region. And I think Genghis did a particularly brilliant job of engaging critically with exactly both these kinds of identities imposed on this generation of artists. There's a particular technique that he uses in his works dating from the period of the late 2000s, early 2010s, which was associated with peace ceasefires, peace processes, and which therefore saw the Western art world, by which I mean Turkey, both Turkey and beyond Europe, et cetera, kind of make inroads or kind of show increasing interest in the region's artists. He cites, visually cites visually references, well known, you know, canonical artwork, landscape artworks, works from the tradition of landscape art. In the photographs that he takes in this moment in time, he does so to both show that he knows his art history, that he already is an artist fully knowledgeable about history, that the Western art world isn't bringing art to Kurdistan, right? That its artists already know what art is, its canons, etc. But he also does so to Kind of implicate his own professional field in the very problem that he and his audiences potentially are interested in engaging critically with. He says that, you know, I'm a landscape photographer, essentially, right? I'm an artist who uses these kind of forms, styles, associated techniques associated with landscape painting. And my art is not simply the solution, it's historically, systemically part of the problem. He, for example, references visually quotes the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which is really known to have enthused Prussian nationalists in Germany and later on, actually the Nazis as well, who obviously committed the Holocaust. Caspar David Friedrich, this painting by him is known to have really kind of enthused these German nationalists about, you know, how German the landscape is and so on. And he's referencing that to show that this kind of particular artistic tradition that he also kind of embeds himself in is actually part of the problem. So what we need to do is first really reflect on the implication of our own field in the very problem we try to overcome before we can assume actually that we can generate these solutions. So I think that is the kind of way in which they are able to kind of reject this kind of idea that they're going to stand up as heroes, be put on a pedestal, represent the oppressed peoples of this region. They're obviously also rejecting being demonized as bad Kurds.
- [40:00]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
This is so interesting and also allows us to think so much about other creative forms that people, Kurdish people, Kurdish constituents continue to develop. And even though we have actually quite a bit of research on Kurdish liberation movement or Kurdish constituents mobilizing for demand for autonomy or self determination, we still see emerging ever more emergent modalities flourishing from the. From the site itself. And you are doing a great job telling us, what are they? So, and my next question is also again related to this idea of non extractivist sensibilities and visual representations, actually. So in the book, unlike the extractivist aesthetic, which renders as we discuss colonized and racialized people and their environments as quantifiable or manageable, you also provide examples of non extractivist artwork. Right. For instance, I was reading, really struck by the analysis of Bedic SA's visual realist films. And I was wondering whether for our audience as well, you could contextualize SA's work for us and explain what you mean by non extractivist sensibilities. How can we detect that sensibility when we see it and how it exemplifies in Saal's work?
- [41:48]
Dr. Erai Chaile
So first of all, let me just Say, in simple terms, something that maybe the book in that particular chapter does not really kind of articulate. And that's the reason or one of the reasons why I find someone like Belica useful to think with. And that is because, much like myself, she isn't from this region. And yet she was invited to engage in a certain kind of collective work there. Indeed, she happened upon the wake of one of the first kind of phases of the state's counterinsurgency siege in a town called Jizir, which is sort of on the border between Turkey, Syria, and really kind of close to Iraq as well. And again, I suppose what I'm trying to do here is I have this kind of, if you want, tendency to avoid sort of like following what I said about Genghis Takin's work, avoid leaving the work of undoing Extractivism only to those who have to deal with its consequences on a daily basis. Basis. I really kind of suggest that whoever is kind of troubled by this problem, insofar as they're especially invited to do something in terms of contributing to this work of undoing extractivism, they should really contribute to the work. Right? So I'm not from Kurdistan, she's not from Kurdistan, So kind of we share this kind of subject position. And yet she was there. She is a video. Well, she's now a much more multidisciplinary artist, but at that time, I suppose she was using more video. She was identifying as a video artist, especially engaging in activist media work in Turkey. She was invited to this town by the Women for Peace initiative to conduct work there with children using her kind of video medium. And again, what she ends up doing is witnessing the aftermath of one of the earliest phases of the counterinsurgency campaign. And her work is really interesting because it really, beyond the typical idea of kind of showing us what's happening, it really makes us, the viewers, aware of the camera being an actor in the field that we are seeing, the field of sociality, the field of violence, the field of relations that are unfolding in this context. Sometimes the camera kind of fails to show certain things. And she constantly raises these questions, like, what's happening? Why am I not able to zoom in? The sound is cut off. And then she kind of uses frames, the mechanism of frames in a very, very interesting way to make us aware by kind of superimposing multiple frames, including not just the frame that she creates herself, but also other kinds of frames, like the screen of a smartphone being shown to her camera, documenting violence, destruction that had just taken place there, etc. So she really kind of makes us terribly, profoundly aware of how the camera is not the only camera that's there, that there are other cameras, that there are smartphones that the residents themselves are using to document the violence, there are other visual technologies that the military is using to enact the violence. And also potentially her own camera is historically, again, by definition, categorically historically implicated in some of the kind of problematic situations that we see. And we're being made aware of that, for example, by the residents that she is there to film suddenly saying things like, you leave, give me the camera, and kind of leaving with the camera, going out on the streets, especially women, and taking the camera in their own hands and starting to film themselves, starting to film children. And I think it's really important as well that although she's not from there, she has this kind of experience of working with children. She obviously is a woman. So that gives her a very, very different kind of entry point into this context. She really establishes this kind of reciprocity in a way with the women and the children in this town. And that really kind of highlights the patriarchal aspect of the violence that's happening. And I kind of discuss in this chapter all of this kind of intersection of patriarchy, coloniality and visuality by also reminding readers about, again, previous episodes of violence that took place in the same town and the region surrounding it. Things like the Armenian genocide and the idea, not the idea, but the fact actually that the counterinsurgent personnel in the mid-2010s would, according to their own kind of logic, insult the locals of Jizir through megaphones as they drove through the streets saying, you are all Armenians. You will die. You are all Armenians. So kind of using this kind of racialized slur, Right? And quite clearly, actually, they have this kind of idea of this region, again being the children of Armenians. And it's actually also a historical fact that after the Armenian genocide, there were, you know, hundreds of women that were abducted to be then assimilated into local families. Right. So basically, patriarchy, children, women, this is already part of the violence, the violence that shaped this environment. And I think it's really, really priceless to be exposed to this kind of work in Sal's work that not only shows us the centrality of patriarchy, but also actually shows us that it is also a very, very visual kind of. Of role that patriarchy plays in this violence.
- [49:11]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
Yeah. And if I may further interpret the idea of non extractivist sensibility there, I think one, the reason that I was struck by. It was also, I was thinking the ethos of your book and the idea of non extractivist sensibilities together, which is about collaboration and so to speak, turning to camera, to the researcher itself and questioning the sensibilities that motivates the research question in the first place. And turning back to our first question and the conversation there, you pictured a project through which like different levels of collaboration take place and that enabled the research, all those conversations. But at the same time we know that, that Northern Kurdistan has been a laboratory not only for, you know, colonial extraction by the state, but also colonial extraction by researchers and artists. And the. The camera never turned to them because they were the saviors and they were another set of actors that, that who perpetuated these dynamics on the ground. And I want like this conversation actually brings not only the role of the state and how there are responses on the ground, but also other forms of extractions and potential non extractivist sensibilities that might emerge in the ground or already taking place in the ground. So I found that very insightful in that regard as well. And my next question is again related to where you left a little bit and the kind of future visions a little bit. I wanted to ask how do you see this rearticulation of extraction violence and in a way, steadfastness among Kurdish constituents through an analysis of predominantly artistic practices could translate into counter extractivist not only visuals but also futures on the ground in northern Kurdistan? And I was also wondering whether you see a risk that these forms might remain primarily theoretical or aesthetic interventions, or could they be translated? Or have you already perhaps observed translations to different realms of politics and aesthetics?
- [51:53]
Dr. Erai Chaile
Very important questions, I must say, first of all, that the anti extractivist futures on the ground are already taking place, have long been taking place. And again, the book isn't, I suppose, aiming to come up with a roadmap of how these futures can take place, because they are already happening. I recently did a book launch in Ahmed itself. Actually that was my first book launch and it was the best book launch ever. It turned into a conversation I started, I talked about for about maybe two, three minutes and then audience members basically just interrupted me, started talking and they were really kind of excited about this particular focus on visuality and so on. And it really turned into a kind of collectively undertaken kind of book launch. And that really shows already that people obviously they're working on this and obviously the very existence of loading itself and there are others like it shows us that this work is already happening on the ground. Now do I see a risk that the kind of work that the book itself does and the artistic practices that it discusses might remain, yeah, limited. I actually don't see that risk. And that has to do with the way I approach it and the way I encourage people to approach theories or practices of the sort that I discuss in the book. There would have been a risk, or let's say there is a risk, insofar as we attribute too transformative capabilities to individual theories or individual works of art or individual artists or individual theorists. But what I argue in the book is precisely against such attribution. I argue that the role of theory, the role of artworks like those I discuss in the book is to raise questions, again, to raise questions about the implication of our own fields of knowledge production, our own fields of practice, in the very problem we try to critique, but also to facilitate, to bring people together physically, actually, in the same space in a kind of embodied way, place, specific way, around a certain focal point. And that tends to be, in my case, visuality. So I think, yes, the risk occurs, and there is that risk. I have to say, in. I see that risk in some of the tendencies that I also engage critically with in the book, in the kind of scholarship that I converse with around coloniality, visuality, etc. You know, there's a risk if we actually say, hey, this particular artwork gives us such a formally novel way of looking at the world that it's going to transform our understanding of coloniality and it's going to solve our problem for us. Right? That is the risk. But if you actually argue against that, if you actually raise questions as well about, you know, before you rush to, you know, decolonizing through art, you first say how. You first ask the question how your own field of practice is actually implicated in the very problem of coloniality. I think that really already is being is having this aversion to that risk. And this is what I also really, interestingly kind of experienced during my time in Ahmed. And since then, actually, I've been. I've continued to be involved in collaborations with architectural and artistic communities. I've organized workshops for them. I've applied for funding to sustain the space. That loading is because it does require funding as this kind of openly accessible space. And I was really kind of intrigued by how, you know, I had read my Decolonial Theory. I went to this context almost apologetic, being apologetic about my own identity as an outsider, not only in the sense of not being from that region, but also being this theorist, you know, who am I to actually go there? I Just write. You know, these people are actually producing work, and I'm just a writer, I teach, etc. Right. I was kind of apologetic about these things, and I was trying to help organize the space, physically, kind of contribute to cleaning. As I said, I slept there. So I did all the kind of dishwashing and these kind of things, and I opened the space, and there was a moment where the co founders basically said, look, stop doing all this kind of work like you're constantly washing dishes. Okay? Do a bit of that. But also theorize. This is why you're here. You have to write. You have to help us frame our work in a way that is legible to our art audiences and in a way that we also feel comfortable with. Right. Because so much of our work has actually been theorized from a lens that is, again, either heroizing or peripheralizing. Right. But now we have the opportunity with you to actually get someone to theorize our work in a way that we actually are comfortable with. Right. So you have to spend your time, maybe writing, organizing workshops. Don't carry so many chairs around. Don't do dishes the whole time. Right. And I think this is really interesting because it really. So on the one hand, you have this kind of questioning in the book, which is something I learn also from the people I collaborated with, the kind of problematization of allocating too much, kind of transformative. Too transformative equality to individual theorists or artworks. But that doesn't necessarily mean that individual theorists like myself should be able to absolve themselves of the responsibility that they have been invited here for. They should be answerable to their expertise. Right. They've gone through all this education, they've gone through all this training. They know people. They are parts of networks. However hierarchical these networks might be, these structures might be. These are the structures that. That people have to grapple with and inhabit. Right. And. And it's only right that people like myself, but also the artists, because they are. Are also. They do have their own standing, obviously, in that city. They are. They have a certain privilege in a. A certain sense. And we really should not really kind of assume that we can just kind of absolve ourselves of the kind of expertise and the privilege and the responsibility that comes with those things. And I think that is something that I learned from all this work, and I continue to learn from all the collaborations, and I try to reflect in the book as well.
- [59:40]
Dr. Ronay Bakan
Thank you so much, Ira, for this fascinating conversation. It's been such a pleasure. These are all my questions. If there is anything else you would like to add. You are more than welcome.
- [59:53]
Dr. Erai Chaile
But yeah, thank you so much indeed. Again, I'm really deeply grateful to you for engaging with the book on such a close level. Your profound engagement really came across in the commentary that you shared today. So thank you so much. Ronay.
- [60:25]
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