External Boundaries, Internal Lines

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It’s nothing new to say that the societies we live in are constructed through inclusion and exclusion practices in many scales and forms. Neither is thinking about distinctions such as hot/cold, darkness/light, loud/silent, public/private through practices of mutual exclusion, definition, redefinition, conflict and segregation. Yet, there is always a need to say new things about what is experienced at the limits and margins of these distinctions. Mary Douglas writes that these “margins and undeveloped areas are always charged with energy.”[1] Transitions, thresholds and bridges have always been the sites where things previously unsaid are stammered out clumsily.

Søren Thilo Funder is an artist living in Kophenag. In his works he often creates situations where the anticipated reality that people try avoid and shut off through exclusion is made ineffective through distortion. In his works we encounter a library cluttered right after an event took place (Wasteland: Bulldog), a shopping mall in same situation (Wasteland: Food Court), sceneries where occur long transitory moments of which one cannot suppose cause-effect relations (Friendlos: aka Bandit Wolf-Man).

In Red Tape: Don’t Go Into Tarlabaşı (2010), Funder performs such an action in order to set these limits, to intensify differences radically and to underline exclusion and inclusion mechanisms. The performance takes place at the margins of two different regimes of reality: the reality of cinema and the reality we live in. There is yet another distinction inside the reality we live in: between the space where the potential of danger accumulates (Tarlabaşı) and “us.”

Tarlabaşı is a district adjacent to central Istanbul. Minorities who composed the majority of the population in the region were forced to fled after the Wealth Tax [Varlık Vergisi] introduced in 1942 and the plunder and pillage during the Incidents of September 6-7, 1955. In 1980, a large avenue that tore Tarlabaşı apart from Taksim and turned it into an isolated area was constructed by demolishing many historical buildings. Today the area mostly inhabited by lower classes and national and international immigrants is being transformed according to plans and projects that involve policies to displace its current population.

Different sources inform us about the existence of certain geographies throughout the world that are deemed to be dangerous: dark, pristine, uncivilized, desolate islands. The most famous of these is Cite Soleil, the ghettos in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, which is defined by the UN as the most dangerous zone on earth. The closed off, lawless region run by armed gangs is a perfect “utopian space.”

The setting of Funder’s film and performance implies a similar space: The warning “Don’t go to Tarlabaşı” indicates the existence of this radically different, lawless and unruly area.

The artist performs his action in this context and interval. With confidence, diligence and solemnity, he covers the doors of the houses in Tarlabaşı with red tape – a gesture he barrows from the film “Kairo”[2] (this gesture reminds us of very extreme instances: the marking of the Jewish houses by the Nazis, what happened in Kosovo, the Maraş Massacre, and Sulukule). The artist leaves his conflict-free welfare environment to locate the uncanny and threatening zones. The interrupting music, dialogs which we know were taken from the film “Kairo,” a woman, a child and a street vendor entering the film frame are like representations of the two sides of the border. These in-between areas transform what can take place inside and the conflict-free space outside into fictions that are constantly disrupted and reconstructed. The threshold moments where the movements of the inside and outside in different constructions are experienced become the ground for the recurrent action of marking.

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[1] Mary Douglas, Saflık ve Tehlike [Purity and Danger] (trans. Emine Ayhan), Metis Yayınları, İstanbul 2007.

[2] “Kairo” (2001) is a thriller directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and produced in Japan. It is about the events that revolve around a ghost that “lives” online. The doors of the houses visited by the ghost are marked with red tape and their residents mysteriously disappear.

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