Material as Personal Knowledge

My father’s eagerness to share his experiences through the slide presentations he would enthusiastically give at family gatherings transformed his individual memory into a collective family memory. What made this possible was the care he devoted to documenting those experiences.

As a child, I would often drift off to sleep in the dim light of the slide projector while listening to these stories. Looking back, I feel that those stories, the flickering images of cultural rituals from a distant geography, of fish whose names I did not know, and of bodies painted with earth pigments, appearing one after another, have played a significant role in shaping my interests today. As lived knowledge and experience take shape through personal ties, they also become the source of a gradual transformation.

During my early childhood, our family moved to Australia following my father. With the perspective that came with being a foreigner accompanied my growing interest in painting, I found myself joining the long family tradition of making a living through skilled hand work. During the early years of my ceramics education in Ankara, red clay, an affordable and readily available local material, was also used for making models in plaster mould classes. While modelling a relief of a prehistoric artefact from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in red clay, I would moisten it repeatedly to prevent it from drying out. The smell that rose from the meeting of water and clay, the feeling of rain falling on fresh earth, distracted me. Looking back, I realize that what has remained with me from that moment is the curiosity that shifted my attention from clay as a packaged material to its origin in the earth and the natural world. In the years that followed, when I first began teaching courses in ceramics and glaze technology, [7] I found myself fascinated by the chemical composition of raw materials and by the direct relationship between rocks and the earth’s surface, despite the highly technical nature of the subject. Although the Turkish word sır (glaze) is unrelated to sır meaning “secret,” the association is difficult to ignore. It evokes a form of experiential knowledge that emerges through long processes of trial and error and becomes legible through direct engagement with the material.

Focusing intensively on a single material during my artistic education deepened my awareness of the capacities and cultures of different materials. Understanding material as a source of tacit knowledge in its own right, situated at the intersection of craft and art, gradually became a field of inquiry for me. I became interested in the ways materials activate the body, in the hierarchies that exist between them, in the varying speeds at which they circulate, and in the kinds of meanings they carry.

I developed the Yaban Düşünce (Wild Thought) series in an effort to create a pause within a contemporary perception inevitably shaped by the dominance of writing. Reading Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book from which the series takes its title [8] over an extended period, I was deeply affected by the way he examines, through the logic of so called primitive languages, the organic relationships that resist categorization and the profound connections established with nature. From ceramic tablets that intersect with the history of writing to texts whose transmission was interrupted with the invention of paper, this trajectory fostered in me a sensitivity to the sometimes limited lifespan of material and to the changing meanings it acquires across time. Through material, I began to pursue a form of knowledge that exists beyond the verbal, one that can be transmitted through touch.

In the same work, Lévi-Strauss examines the bricoleur, the maker who works with their hands, the logic of constructing with what is already at hand, and the mode of thought shaped by gathering whatever the surrounding environment has to offer according to the principle that “it might come in useful one day.” The bricoleur not only “speaks” to objects, but also speaks through them: Through the choices made within the limits of available means, they tell the story of their personality and their life. They never fully realize their original plan, yet they always leave something of themselves within it. [9]

One artist whose performative installations resonate closely with Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur is A. Serkan Aka. In his studio, he meticulously reconfigures all kinds of materials collected from the city. He describes the acts of collecting and accumulating as a way of relating to, and coming to terms with, the continual demolition and reconstruction of the city in which he lives. His assemblages, part machine, part sound sculpture, and part musical instrument, are “irregular apparatuses” that resist definition. Their function is not immediately apparent, yet they invite us into an encounter, into a process of mutual acquaintance, and into a shared experience. 

Reflecting on the source of the relationship he has developed with a wide range of materials, first through his engineering education and later through many years of working as a designer producing practical solutions, the artist points to the conditions under which he grew up in the countryside, where access to materials was shaped not from the position of a consumer but by constraint. His memories of the looms and sewing machines that formed part of his family’s shared memory become eloquent in the relationships he establishes with found objects and discarded fragments. Aka describes contemporary industrial materials as “deaf” or “mute.” Compared to a natural and resilient material such as wood, whose own movement and character require attentiveness and care, he argues that newer industrial materials are far more compliant. The dialogue he constructs through the diversity of materials gathered from his surroundings turns our attention to the memory embedded in the everyday.

Aka is also a member of the Tophane Noise Band. Together they create improvised performances using sounds produced from urban waste, scrap, and recycled materials. The apparatuses, most of them built by Aka, amount to an excavation of sound in its most elementary form. Retracing the knowledge he acquired through the precision of instrument making, he explores sound through simple constructions.

Their recent installations and performances, Batak Arşiv (Swamp Archive), [10] create opportunities for unexpected encounters among the rocks where the city meets the sea. When the southwesterly wind allows, water flutes installed among the rocks blend their sound into the noise of the city. As the flutes are played along the shoreline in this improvise performance, we witness, however briefly, a form of publicness open to interaction, where passersby and animals alike become part of the encounter, revealing the transformative potential of shared experience.

Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis on the first rather than the primitive [11] appears in artistic practice as a way of looking backwards. Today, under the pervasive influence of the digital, the impulse to look again at the material world and to reconsider the meaning of what remains invites us to reflect once more on what it means to be in genuine contact with life. Can reflecting on the meanings carried by material open up a productive discussion for an artist, an upholsterer, an archaeologist, or a performance artist alike? As different modes of practice come into dialogue with one another, and as people and objects enter into unique relationships, we encounter materials that acquire unexpected forms and meanings.

At a moment when our increasingly instrumental relationship with the earth has brought us to an impasse, and when our interaction with the more-than-human has reached an ethical threshold, the meaning of the material [12] has become a central concern, regardless of distinctions between the animate and the inanimate. Every point of contact therefore calls for careful consideration through an integrated perspective. The engagement with material transforms the entire process of making into a living and reciprocal experience. Material positions itself as a collaborator capable of revealing itself to us. Ultimately, what I have sought to open up here under the name of material is perhaps the possibility of hearing the thing we hold in our hands begin to speak to us, as every form of contact expands through memory and awareness. Rather than inviting classification, it calls for a way of seeing that remains open to transformation. From a more than human perspective, what we define as material also occupies a place as one of the social actors [13] in an ongoing process of transformation, participating in exchanges that unfold across both micro and macro scales. What is at stake here is a field of interaction shaped by the care with which we attend to the particular worlds of those with whom we enter into relation. Material is not something fixed, but a web of relations that asks us to become acquainted with its voice and its disposition.

Establishing a dialogue with material that becomes personal through interaction may require a slow rhythm and years of accumulation. Equally, it may begin by using a completely unfamiliar material in entirely the wrong place. More than a matter of technical skill, it is an experimental process that develops through encounters with different disciplines and fields, and one that is often nourished by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To understand the character of a clay body, to become capable of hearing the sound produced by a plastic pipe, and to listen as it speaks with the sea, is to begin learning the language of material. Although this may appear simple, it is something that can only be reached after a long journey. To think through material is always to preserve the possibility of opening a space for something singular, together with all the historical and cultural relations it carries, through a deeply personal mode of attention directed toward what lies embedded within it.