At the Edge of all Possibles
Lecture Performance, 2014
In his essay titled The Storyteller (1936), Walter Benjamin observes that he encounters storytellers less and less, claiming that information has superseded experience in the modern world. After 78 years, after the best and worst days of our lives, after a great resistance wherein many emotions have obtained new meanings, we found ourselves standing before a giant archive of analysis, texts, videos and images. “How to represent resistance or uprisings in an artistic field?” is an ongoing discussion since 2000's and there are a variety of trials around the subject. After the Gezi Uprising, we found ourselves engaged with the same question as well, in an increasing pace. Yet, personally, I was reflecting upon a possible "lack" by asking: "In this era of excessive information, is there anything left not represented?" Could this lack be the "epic side of the truth" (as Benjamin defined), the human story, emotions, and affects?
In this lecture performance, I would like to try going back to the basics of storytelling where the storyteller builds a story to preserve and spread the shared human experience: a story that anyone can connect without knowing the facts or where the events took place and the chronology; a story that can only exist within something bigger than one's existence, only in a moment in which the body and the self dissolve in the body of the resistance, in which there is no “I”, and “we” changes its meaning. The sole tool of the story would be the oldest tool of mankind’s experience sharing: the human voice.
