Çüngüş, Turkey—Garni, Armenia—Philadelphia, USA. November 2017
Images from the redacted, archival collage by D. Cachoian-Schanz. June 2016 – present. Cover image by E. Shahinian, Yerevan 2015.
Չünքüşաbaտum (Çüngüşabadoum): The Dictionary of (In)animate Objects and Tales of Hearsay
Art Book, Digital Humanities Project, and Exhibition
A collaborative project with B. Güldoğan about intergenerational trauma and archival redaction.
Prelude. Collisions 1: A 100-year Meeting. Istanbul. September, 2015: An encounter that would change how both of us imagined the small village of Çüngüş and its many afterlives which have taken affective hold of us since 1915. Stories and silences, spaces and their collapses into abjection, and openings through spatiotemporal divides. As two young women researchers working on counter-narrative in text and space, I became acquainted with Bengi while we were both guest students in a course called Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence at Sabancı University. The memory of our meeting remains palpable. I remember fixating on her hands as she spoke. I watched her long fingers as they moved through her subtle, quasi-mechanic gesticulations, as if always unsure of what to do with one’s hands in close proximity to others; a person too taken by outside stimuli and her own curiosities to be distracted by trends, or in taking a moment to recognize her own beauty. She smiled and laughed like my great aunt. Kilometers had separated us by one hundred years and now, she was there standing just a half a meter, a half a second’s distance, before me. Her fingers were so delicate, elegant in their frailty, as they excitedly showed a colored picture of a framed arma christi embroidered on silver and gold threaded sash to the professor who’d invited us both; who’d staged this meeting. “It was in the church, and now it’s hanging on my great aunt’s wall!” I looked on, wanting somehow to claim what was in the picture, go to Diyarbakır and free it from its captivity, its wrongful place, yet knowing it was not mine, and never mine, to either save or claim. The line between one’s impulse for violence and capriciousness is fine, indeed. I would have become the vandal. Already, I was. Still now, her hands seem to tremor ever so slightly. I looked down at my hands and my thick-boned fingers. They could have crushed hers so easily if I held them and squeezed just a bit too hardily. They are capable of such things. But how to crush something I had known for so long? That I had waited so long to confront? A history of the present… in the present. A mirage between an “affirmation and forgetting”… A moment that gestured towards the what-could-have-beens but also, the what-wases and what-always-is-becomings in each moment of a new encounter[1]… Ayşe Gül introduced us, and we looked at each other, not knowing quite where to begin, or how much each of us could already know or say about the other. We did not speak, we looked… the only thing occurring to us—silently embrace. That meeting since began our ongoing four-year long research project and friendship; two women whose lives separated and brought back together over kilometers of stories, silences, time and three continents, by a small Anatolian village known to both by its slightly variant pronunciations: Chunkoush/Çüngüş. (excerpt from Introduction)
[1] David Eng, Feeling of Kinship, 2010. 63-4.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz 