An unsettling re-composition: Istanbul's lost Armenian April 11 Memorial

Highlights

• Documents the one-hundred-year absence of a memorial to the Armenian Intellectuals killed in 1915.

• Uses re-composition, isometric projection, and mapping as a framework for visualising archival absences.

• Discusses the lasting impact that the erection and removal of monuments can have on the urban landscape.

Abstract

This research uses 3D drawing techniques to create a re-composition of the lost April 11 Memorial, a contested monument which commemorated the deportation of Armenian intellectuals from Istanbul in 1915. We use the only photograph of the monument remaining in the public record as a witness to inform this re-composition and multiply the possibilities of remembering through the medium of drawing. The memorial's absence in the archive can be viewed as an extension of the violence Armenians endured during the deportations and subsequent massacres of the twentieth century, as well as a prolonged suppression of the Armenian people's right to memory within Turkey's unequal historical geography. For this reason, we represent the monument in a new way, in a new medium. Our research explores the value of non-physical reproductions of lost monuments. The re-composition takes place through making a visual and spatial analysis of the photograph, and reveals how drawing techniques, that use 3-dimensional projections, can be used to overcome the absence of knowledge. This method allows us to speculate on the lost monument, to reappropriate and carry it to the present by producing a new visual archive. This act also calls for the profanation, in Agamben's sense, of the memorial by unsettling and removing this forbidden object from the realm of the sacred and the inviolable. Through play and design, we open up a new use and space for the lost memorial.

Introduction

In May 2013, the Gezi Park protests started in Istanbul, Turkey, as a small resistance movement against the redevelopment of a centrally located park. The violent response to the protestors by the police sent shockwaves throughout the country, causing the protests to morph into a larger movement against the government's wider silencing of its opposition.¹ During these protests, DurDe!, an organisation that works to combat hate speech and racism within Turkey, made a statement bringing attention to the little-known April 11 Memorial and calling for it to be rebuilt in the park.²

The April 11 Memorial (also known as the Armenian Genocide Memorial) is believed to have been erected in 1919 in remembrance of Armenian intellectuals deported from Constantinople, contemporary Istanbul, between 1915 and 1917. It exists in the visual record through a single photograph (see Fig. 1). Despite the dearth of further visual reference, it is said to have been located on the land adjacent to Gezi Park, previously Surp Agop Armenian Cemetery, which was appropriated by the state in the 1930s.³ The timing of the statement by DurDe! was poignant. It reflected not only the Armenian community's demands that the deportations and massacres of this period be more widely acknowledged as it approached the centenary of the events, but also reminded the protesters gathered at Gezi Park that the site was already a contested space.

Gezi Park is located next to one of Istanbul's busiest and most well-known gathering places, Taksim Square. The backlash against the plans to redevelop the park were heightened by the fact this square has historically been used as a site of protest.⁴ Various groups were present during the Gezi protests, and DurDe! was not the only group bringing attention to the Armenian history of the park. Amongst the loud rallying cries of Gezi, ‘Everywhere is Taksim, everywhere resists’, Armenian youth group Nor Zartonk had placed a styrofoam gravestone that read ‘you captured our graveyard, but you can't capture our park!’ on the park floor.⁵

During the protests, supporters and participants painted a picture that as a group they formed a diverse range of profiles in terms of social, economic and ethnic backgrounds, despite their common interest. Whitehead and Bozoğlu have credited this to Gezi park and Taksim square's function as a space in ‘which people may “construct their own identities in relation to a politically-framed, geographically-located past”, even where the “past'' in question extends back well before people's own life-times’.⁶ Parla and Özgül added nuance to this argument, asserting that although the range of protestors at Gezi Park may have been diverse, the representation of Armenian activists among the protestors is not the equivalent to an ‘equal footing’.⁷ They are critical of the ‘celebration’ of the coming together of different groups at Gezi, whilst there failed to be a widespread acknowledgment of the history of the land that had previously been confiscated by the state and the wider violence this signified.

The burying of Armenian heritage has taken place in Istanbul through the physical violence of the destruction of graveyards and buildings, but also through the erasure of street names and the appropriation of buildings and public spaces.⁸ This condemns to obscurity even what is visible at surface level. This denial of Armenian cultural heritage, which is not limited to Istabul but has taken place across the country, forms part of the current and historical policy of Turkey. This stems from the mass murders that took place during the deportations of Armenians between 1915 and 1917. To further contextualise this political landscape, over the past decades various actors, including activists, journalists and writers, have had criminal charges brought against them for using the term ‘Armenian Genocide’.⁹

The study of the production of history, and how social memory is constructed within, and formed by, hegemonic power structures, has been widely examined within the field of memory studies, specifically, the politics of memory.¹⁰ As set out by Hodgkin and Radstone, over the past decades ‘not only the reliability of memory and experience as exact records of the past, but also the very notion of historical truth, have come into question; ‘the past is constituted in narrative, always representation, always construction’.¹¹ In the Turkish context scholarship has centred on the various forms of erasure of memory that took place during the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and how this approach to memory was a strategy in establishing authority in the wake of the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and in the formation of the new Turkish identity.¹² Regarding 1915, Avedian has discussed how international pressures to recognise the Armenian massacres as genocide, resulted in ‘the evolution of the historical narrative at home, authored by former diplomats and state officials to dismiss the accusations, vilifying the victims, whose traitorous actions were to blame for their “unfortunate” fate’.¹³

The politics of memory is not limited to rhetoric but also has physical implications. Spanning decades, an extensive array of literature has been dedicated to exploring the relationship between memory and geography.¹⁴ Referring to Turkey, Özyürek contrasts Pierre Nora's well-established notion of ‘sites of memory’, ‘Les Lieux de Mémoire’, with their assertion that Turkey in its Republican era became saturated with ‘sites of forgetting’.¹⁵ They argue that such sites are ‘marked with a residual sense of rupture that should be constantly remembered to prove that the break actually took place’.¹⁶ This article adds to the vast existing literature that examines monuments within the study of geography and memory, arguing that this forgetting, through erasure and appropriation on the material surface level of Istanbul, has concealed and obscured the former existence of the April 11 Memorial.¹⁷ Through the obscuring of the monument, the lack of knowledge of what happened to it, or even directly where it was located, there has been an attempt to forge the area of contemporary Gezi Park into such a ‘site of forgetting’, or as Parla and Özgül have described Gezi Park, as a site that has revealed a ‘political geography haunted by absences’.¹⁸ However, a ‘site of forgetting’ is not a site that is forgotten. There are many questions surrounding the April 11 Memorial that are produced through its absence, such as how was it dismantled and by whom? What became of it? Does it still exist or was it destroyed? These questions have been left unanswered.

Within this context, a monument that stood for only a few years, and that has been absent for over one hundred years, offers an opportunity for us to consider how we can interpret the legacy of monuments and the memory they forge in our built environment. Lara Choksey, after attending the removal of the Edward Colston statue during the Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol during 2020, considered this mark on time that monuments can create.¹⁹ She reflected on the slave trader's likeness being briefly replaced by that of Jen Reid, one of the protestors who stood on the plinth directly after Colston had been dragged down. The statue of Jenn Reid was only in place for a day, Choksey asks ‘What do these rising days do to public time?’.²⁰ The Gezi protests demonstrated that even as new layers of history unfolded, the continuation of policies that fail to acknowledge, and continue to erase, the Armenian history of the area could not prevent discussion on the history of the space. The question of how the state, without due consultation, could forcibly redevelop the park, forced the events of over one hundred years previous to resurface. The ‘captured park’ again became the ‘captured graveyard,’ even if this was still only possible as a ‘whisper’ among many other voices.²¹

Our methodology for this research uses re-composition as an act of mediating and revealing the counter narratives that are produced through investigating these questions. This re-composition involves the combining of archival material, the image and the map, with drawings that interpret the memory of the space and the questions produced through the memorial's absence. Here we do not focus on the possibility of the memorial being physically rebuilt and reinstated, or an analysis of the political conditions that would accommodate or provide permissions for the monument at a state level. Instead, we argue that the value of engaging in a non-physical reconstruction and producing drawings of the lost April 11 Memorial are twofold.

Firstly, practising the re-composition of the monument through the act of drawing marks its absence and the passing of time. We propose that imagining a monument that both utilises the limited resources from the archive but also lays bare, through physical representation, the voids of the archive has the potential to transform the monument into a vehicle for memorialising not only the events of 1915–17, but also the repercussions of the state violence against the right to memory through erasure in the urban landscape.

Secondly, the drawings aim to serve as documentation, punctuating the archives that hold only one image of the monument. These drawings, created one hundred years later, form part of an updated visual record, contextualising the monument's absence within the landscape of today.

In the following section we introduce our methodology to the reader. We address the necessity of removing the monument from its position as a forbidden and sacred object, in order to present the multiple possibilities of its existence. We examine our act of drawing in relation to Agamben's theory, that a removal from the sacred calls for a profanation, and that play can enable such an act.²² From a technical aspect, these drawings will address how we can imagine the memorial given the limited visual information available in the archive and how we could begin to map projections of a 3-dimensional object, for which the only reference we have is a singular image, its 3-dimensionality rendered flat and collapsed into film.