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17th
International Architecture Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia
Pavilion of Turkey
22/05—21/11/2021
SALE D'ARMI, ARSENALE
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PAPERWORK40
MYSTERIOUS
PRECISION
Curatorial Team
Published on
22/10/2021
Keywords
PAPERWORK, BUREAUCRACY, PRECISION
UNESCO, Major Items of Equipment Supplied to the Project- Appendix D - Structural Conservation of Göreme Findings and Recommendations, 1988.
Published on
22/10/2021
Keywords
PAPERWORK, BUREAUCRACY, PRECISION
MYSTERIOUS
PRECISION
Curatorial Team

Precision is always accompanied by mystery as one wonders what further details lay beyond the veil of something assumed to be objective and comprehensive. On the penultimate page of a report from an early data-gathering expedition to the cave-dwellings of Göreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia by UNESCO in 1988, three years after the organization named the area a World Heritage Site, there is a curious list of 35 objects. The report includes pithy summaries of what some of the objects were used for—namely the general act of “surveying”—but not how they were used. As such, this list is the sole, sparse description of the actual activities of the expedition, alluding through their precise names, while obscuring technocratic operations in the background. The names of the objects are themselves highly specific— “Complete burner assembly for GBC Model 902 AA Spectrophotometer,” “Special Copeland refrigeration compressor”—and recall the absurd precision of the categories from Borges’s bizarre Chinese encyclopedia in his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: “those that at a distance resemble flies,” “those that have just broken the flower vase.”1 Here too is a high level of precision but also a degree of mystery. There is an embedded irony in using seemingly precise and objective bureaucratic management tools like this piece of paperwork as UNESCO continues its efforts to preserve and maintain Göreme as a heritage landscape. The “objective” mystery of heritage bureaucracy is complicated even further once it meets its more political counterpart. In 2019, Turkish authorities decreed  the removal of the area’s status as a national park—which it had held since 1986 in the wake of UNESCO’s heritage designation—to centralize control over the area, including activities and developments concerning tourism.2 In light of this more contemporary veil of regulatory framework, one wonders what other types of paperwork will unveil various untold stories at the site and provoke other stories and futures. 

 

1
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, Otras Inquisiciones, (Sur, Buenos Aires, 1952).
2
Law on Cappadocia Region (Kapadokya Alanı Hakkında Kanun). Law Number: 7174 in Resmi Gazete 30791 (2019).
  1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, Otras Inquisiciones, (Sur, Buenos Aires, 1952).
  2. Law on Cappadocia Region (Kapadokya Alanı Hakkında Kanun). Law Number: 7174 in Resmi Gazete 30791 (2019).