A scene from the beginning of the film The Unknown Girl (2016) by the Dardenne brothers: the film’s protagonist, a female doctor, listens to a patient’s chest using a stethoscope. In the frame, we see the doctor’s face, the two transmitters that reach her ears, and the path of the stethoscope leading to the patient’s chest. Neither the tip of the stethoscope nor the patient is visible on screen. The only things we see are the changes in the doctor’s expressions as she listens to the patient’s heartbeat. Not being able to see what the device is listening to and not being able to hear what the doctor hears produces a strangeness, which reveals something of the horror of listening and being able to listen. What is being listened to is describable, but the quality and texture of the sound cannot be fully relayed through words. Its physicality, its seeping into our bones, its modes of penetration, the ears point to how sound and the act of listening are constantly negotiating numerous boundaries. At the same time, what we feel in the stomach and the gut when we listen to such a sound, and the dissonances between this feeling and the rhythm of the listener’s heart, are constituents of how sound works. 

Photo by Doğa Yirik. 

My exhibition titled Intimations, opened at AVTO– a cultural space in Istanbul–on January 5, 2024.  It was centered around the difference between silence and howling as I was interested in how field recordings of landscapes could be attuned to our inner voices, histories, and unuttered affects. The works in the exhibition focused on what we are able to hear, what we want to hear, and what we seek as we hear, using various tools of recording and performance to suggest a range of attunements. This difference between silence and howling, that we might not always be able to express in words but  can sense intuitively, is more than a crack or a gap; instead, it feels like a twitch. The space between silence and howling is a field in which things gnaw away at us, at our conscience’s movements, and the unresolved cracklings of the everyday approach each other. This gap attempts to relay those things that appear in our nightmares, that we might not have had the time and emotional labor to contemplate or feel in daily life. To go on an archaeological study of our personal and social memories and sensations. 

Installation view from Intimations (2024), AVTO, Istanbul, Turkey. 

Sinkholes, which emerge when the ceilings of underground caves collapse, have shaped my research process for a reason. After seeing a sinkhole that had formed on his land at night, a farmer uttered in disbelief that he was not confident about the sinkhole’s presence. Yet, it was still right there when he went to see it again the next day. This utterance points to the temporality of collapse that appears sudden but which we know to be spread across time, insisting on holding those seemingly conflicting temporalities together in the space of the sinkhole. Just as the physical formation of the sinkhole is both gradual and sudden in that it takes centuries to form, yet appears to have occurred overnight; the collapse is both excruciatingly slow and painfully sudden. 

In 2021, I started spending hours with images of sinkholes. This interest emerged from the deepening practice of watching my screen for hours during COVID-19. I categorized images of sinkholes into three groups: images of sinkholes in which a human being stands by the rim both to give scale and to recognize the discoverer; images that follow the steps of feet on the dry ground, tracing the cracks that lead to the sinkhole, and finally, the images in which we see the sinkhole from above, captured using drones. While I have been struggling with why I have an issue with stealing the bird’s eye perspective, I now begin to realize why I have a particular problem with this perspective when it comes to sinkholes: the projection of the bird’s eye view is to see what we are looking at as a whole. 

Still from the video  / or is the horizon line just another crack? (2021). The full video is available here. 

This modality of seeing allows for humans to transcend the limitations of their bodies. This is possible while reducing the landscape that they are looking at, to a surface that can be governed, consumed, and compressed. As I write these lines on the 101st day of the genocide in Gaza, I think of what the bird’s eye perspective of war technologies removes contact from, what they legitimize, distance, and how they reveal the blindspots of the human imagination become even more evident. 

As I tried to tune into the mumblings of the cracks that lead to the sinkholes and to the sinkholes themselves, I realized that I was under the litany of images. I realized that as I watched the images of the sinkholes, I could not hear anything. I recognized that what I was looking at was a howling. The incredibly alluring image of the sinkhole broadcasted a sense of void that was corporeal, almost gut-wrenching. I became cognizant of this synesthetic experience as I recognized why many image-makers flew drones over sinkholes: they were driven by a desire to consume, and swallow the sinkhole whole. Yet, the sinkhole resisted becoming a metaphor, an image that stands for something concrete and digestible. It was and is a semiotic conundrum, drawing us in through the collapse it signified yet refusing to become any one thing. It required and beckoned me to tune into the howlings within and outside it. 

Even though I had felt that the comprehensiveness of the bird’s eye view was misleading before, I had not been able to articulate why. Now,  the howling that the sinkhole images produced made their refusal to become easily digestible images audible for the first time. What I saw in the holes of the sinkholes that were at times dark and wet, sometimes with form, sometimes without any recognizable shape, but always alluring, was the howling. Being able to see the sound was beyond synesthesia; it revealed the void and the lack of the wholeness, which seeing just the image had concealed. In other words, being able to see the howling made visible what had not been said and what had not been spoken about, revealing what had not been heard. And the only way out was to synchronize with the howling and to refuse the bird’s eye view. In the sinkhole was a third sound volume beyond the howling inside our bodies and the howling outside our bodies, a howling that whispered as we approached the rim, telling us that we could not fully hear if we never went down into the hole. A howling brought about by a collapse, an upheaval, emerging from the void not being there one moment and appearing in another. 

The overnight sinkholes are embodiments in the landscape of global warming that feel more palpable on a scorching day or in the middle of an atmospheric river, as if decades of global warming only exist when we can feel the extreme weather. On the other hand, just as the drought and the disappearance of underground water resources become more legible through collapses, the “appearing overnight” also points to nights on which the prevalent state violence becomes more evident. In this context, looking at the sinkholes required me to hear their howling and the temporalities emitted from that howling. To relate to the landscape, I needed not to be a bird but to listen to the ground and even attempt to construct a new landscape that wove together the earth’s upheavals and the people’s upheavals. 

Still from Between Breaths (2023). Visual translation by Serra Şensoy. 

The work Between Breaths (2023) that I show in the exhibition Intimations corresponds to an attempt to make visible and audible what I experienced alongside three other people. As we went to visit the Kızören Sinkhole located in the northeast of Konya, we had a mis-en-scene in mind: I was going to read a text that I had written without punctuation marks and capitalization, which I had constructed as a lengthy interior monologue, twice. Once would be the one-page text as it was, and the second would be after I produced a hole in the middle of the page. Deep inside, I knew I would not be able to be in dialogue with the sinkhole; I could not pretend that we sat across from each other and conversed, sinkhole to person. The only thing I could do was to imitate the sinkhole’s collapse, to put the text and language’s collapse alongside the earth’s collapse—side by side. 

Over time, I realized I wanted to go to the sinkhole not to say something but to bury things in it. Thus, Serra’s (Şensoy) crackling sounds on the screen that expand and animate the text to overtake the screen with the black hole correspond to the things that haunt us. These hauntings can never be completed because they are made up of fragments. Different parts are constantly re-configured, and the gaps between these pieces reproduce and deepen the howlings. I, who could see the howlings, am now seen by the howlings. 

Photo by Doğa Yirik. 

The howling of the sinkholes is similar to the experience of the hole and approaching the hole, the absence of someone who passes, and the inability to comprehend that feeling after the loss. When my grandmother died, as we gathered her things, we would find bits and batteries of hearing aids that my grandfather– her husband– had been using for over sixty years. When my grandmother was well, my grandfather and she visited the doctor every year. My grandmother would tell me how my grandfather’s hearing aids were becoming smaller with every visit and that he could hear better each year. This particular memory makes me ache. These hearing aid pieces that appear across the house, ranging from the kitchen cabinet to the remote control pouch in the living room, evoke a feeling similar to what I felt watching the doctor listen with an unspecified stethoscope, as the hearing aids are divorced from the ear they settle into. Each hearing aid corresponded to millions of words and breaths that it carried within it, while the independence of these tiny objects and the loss of my grandmother, who had been their guardian, made me think about the two-sidedness of hearing. Hearing the hole, being heard by the hole, standing in the void, and hearing the void, being heard by the void. 

Between Breaths is about how, as I tried to listen to my breath, my heart began to slow down, and how what the landscape says, does not say, and could have said expands into a howling. Thus, it is like a yearning. When the absence of breaths becomes a howling, the cave ceiling collapses to produce the sinkhole, an interrupted moment spreading across centuries.