Landscapes Of Loss:|bGrieving A Changing City In Ara Güler’s Istanbul Photography And Zaven Biberyan’s Novels

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3422560

This thesis explores Istanbul as a landscape of loss and both the human and more-than-human dynamics of grief and remembering through the novels of Zaven Biberyan and the Istanbul photography of Ara Güler. Both Biberyan’s and Güler’s works deal with the representation and residue of political and systemic violence as it crystallizes in events such as those of 6-7 September 1955 and its disastrous consequences as they manifest through generations in a period marked by major transformations around the city. I try to argue that this kind of violence is not divorced from the more-than-human landscape: the scale of ecocide taking place in Istanbul and around Turkey today is an extension and continuation of economic, political and historical violence, exile and genocide enacted upon those bodies and communities othered by the state. I argue how the way Biberyan and Güler navigate the loss of the intimate material relationships with the city opens a doorway into grief and offers a potentially reparative response to the exhaustive logic of Marc Nichanian’s definition and formulation of Disaster. By framing grief as a reparative lens, I trace how Biberyan and Güler’s human subjects open up to transcorporeal becomings with the more-than-human landscape of Istanbul, and argue that these relationships form the basis of feelings of “belonging”. I conclude the thesis by thinking about the ways of imagining and writing reparative stories of survival in the face of loss, destruction and accretive disasters that frame the imaginative ways both artists bear witness to and story the changing landscape of Istanbul.