Flames Among Stones 2019 +

Flames Among Stones

Two channel HD colour video installation with 5.1 sound 2019
13'11"

Editor: Lara Garcia Reyne
Narrator: Ahenk Demir
Sound design & music: Udit Duseja
Colourist: Yannis Kanakis

Untitled photogravure, framed, glazed, 41.5cm x 34.5cm

Untitled hand-dyed textile, cotton, silk, natural dyes, 90 cm x 300cm, 2021

Established in Cappadocia by sisters Güler and Türkan, the garden at the centre of the two-channel video and textile installation Flames Among Stones is a haven, a fertile ground for entering into resonance with the earth and its knowledge. Together with their daughters and granddaughters, the siblings quietly care for their enclave’s ecosystem and numerous more-than-human inhabitants. Together, they collectively shape space for community and cultivation, following seasonal rhythms. They make the garden as much as the garden makes them. Through organic gestures, they work with soil, and not against it —potentiating its growth—, as if they were equally part of a living cell whose membrane would be the plot’s protective wall.

Correspondingly, a vast curtain surrounds the video as a skin formed by panels of fabric, hand-dyed with earth and plant pigments sourced from the sisters’ enclosed garden along with soil and vegetal matter collected from other community, memorial, allotment, and guerrilla gardens—each spaces for solidarity and resistance. The imprints of these lands in the fabric are sensorially experienced while crossing into the imaginary space opened by the video. In an intimate pact, the textile holds the audience as the wall holds the sisters.

The garden could not exist without the wall marking the separation of an autonomous female space that escapes an authoritarian and patriarchal society. Within these boundaries, resisting the urban sprawl, the green land acts as an interface offering alternative strategies to forms of oppression. Güler and Türkan remind us of the significance of collective work and resilience in a period when the connection to land has been lost by most city dwellers. Gardening becomes the route to another form of wisdom to reground ourselves and respond to exclusive politics and ecological degradation. Fragile, the garden also reflects frictions. How to ward off an expanding city’s real estate pressure? What will happen after the sisters, now in their 80s, are no longer here? Who will take care of the land with their family scattered across different cities? Would their matrilineal transmission chain be broken as the one of Şahmaran?

Simultaneously unfolding across the video is Şahmaran’s story, a cautionary Kurdish folktale of intersectional knowledge and power loss. The fate of this deity with the head of a woman and the body of a snake is entwined with the garden narrative. Caves, rocks and crevices are the mineral counterpoints of the verdant leafage, and suggest the journey taken to reach Şahmaran’s lush haven. Convoking the presence and texture of resistant and resilient lands, the textile creates a sensorial cave within the metaphysical one, and a fictitious garden echoing the tangible one. Şahmaran’s ability to perceive earthly and otherworldly secrets and wisdom runs parallel to the women’s collective knowledge. Yet, her matriarch’s line is interrupted when, after being betrayed, her wisdom is passed on to her lover instead of her daughters. Despite this rupture, the installation, weaving age-old and contemporary narratives, conveys a sense of female strength. Pushing through the hanging veil is to merge into non-patriarchal, embodied and more-than-human forms of learning and sharing, unearthing forgotten myths, tools, approaches and perceptions.

While Şahmaran’s haunting legacy may suggest a warning against the disconnection from soil teachings and the disappearance of ancestral transmission chains, it is a poignant reminder to collaborate and contribute to communal knowledge production, sharing support, hope and resistance. Flames Among Stones asks how we act to protect our real and imagined gardens, and acknowledges that community forming stems from a web of connection and kin nurtured in the same soil.

Clelia Coussonnet, 2022

Installation view, 8th Thessaloniki Biennale, Being As Communion, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras, MOMus, 2023. Photograph by Stefanos Tsakiris

Installation view: MeetFactory, Prague, from the exhibition Planted in the Body, curated by Clelia Coussonnet and Tereza Jindrová, 26 June 2021 to 22 August 2021

Flames Among Stones, untitled video still

Installation view, 8th Thessaloniki Biennale, Being As Communion, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras, MOMus, 2023. Photograph by Stefanos TsakirisInstallation view, 8th Thessaloniki Biennale, Being As Communion, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras, MOMus, 2023. Photograph by Stefanos Tsakiris

Installation view: MeetFactory, Prague, from the exhibition Planted in the Body, curated by Clelia Coussonnet and Tereza Jindrová, 26 June 2021 to 22 August 2021 Installation view: MeetFactory, Prague, from the exhibition Planted in the Body, curated by Clelia Coussonnet and Tereza Jindrová, 26 June 2021 to 22 August 2021

Flames Among Stones, untitled video still Flames Among Stones, untitled video still

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