On the Document Titled “Gmail — Altyazı/Dipnot Daveti: 2020 Venedik Bienali, Ölçü Olarak Mimarlık”

Published on

21/05/2022

Keywords

COMMUNICATION, PAPERWORK, LIVING TOGETHER

ON THE DOCUMENT TITLED
"GMAIL – CAPTION/FOOTNOTE
INVITATION:
2020 VENICE BIENNALE,
ARCHITECTURE AS
MEASURE"

Eray Çaylı

This document is an email sent from the team curating the Pavilion of Turkey, coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), at the 2020 Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, to an early career academic, inviting him to contribute to the exhibition’s website. As briefly mentioned in the document, the curatorial framework of the exhibition focuses on phenomena such as “climate change” and “mineral extraction.” It seems that the academic was invited by the curatorial team due to his writings that called for thinking the Anthropocene and climate change as not only environmental but also political problems, particularly through the frameworks discussed by scholars such as Kathryn Yusoff and T.J. Demos. The contribution asked of the academic and promised to be published on the exhibition’s website would be a document to be provided by him and an accompanying “caption/footnote” attached to that document. The email document at hand allows us to make important deductions about the relationship between issues regarding the politics of ecology, which by the year 2020 have become visible under the rubrics of the Anthropocene and climate change, and practices of intellectual and cultural production such as those of the humanities, art, or architecture. One of the most important deductions is that this relationship involves methodological as well as contextual aspects. Put more concretely, the document is proof that issues regarding the politics of ecology permeate practices of intellectual and cultural production not only as topics these practices would question or enlighten but also as a force that bears upon the methods employed by said practices. This document helps observe that the method of extractivism, which characterizes the geographical imaginations and dispositions of some of the most devastating socio-political projects afflicting today’s politics of ecology, such as racially motivated nation-statism and colonialism, is effective in the realm of intellectual and cultural production—a realm that comprises biennials, exhibitions, research, and curation—as much as it affects other political realms. For a detailed justification of this observation, please refer to the text available through this link. ¹

____________

Editorial Note:

Written in February 2020, the text above and a longer additional piece included through a hyperlink to an offline blog site were submitted by the author four days after our invitation email for a 200-word contribution to be published in the Paperwork section. As the submitted texts contained numerous misinterpretations and false assumptions, we felt the responsibility to add this editorial note.

It needs to be stated that all our contributors have been financially compensated for their contributions, alongside any necessary image permissions and copyright fees, which were also paid for by our project. Despite having already received an honorarium and been informed about our project's remuneration policy after their submission, the author chose to inaccurately claim in their blog that we have expected the author to "provide his labor...free of charge." They made this claim on the basis that the communication regarding the honorarium began after their submission, and despite being given opportunities to revise the content of the original submission, they have not corrected this false statement.

Addressing every single incorrect assumption in this blog would be beyond the scope of this editorial note; especially given that our project is inherently committed to questioning and dismantling the power structures of extractivism and environmental justice as they relate to architecture's inner workings toward collective reckoning, critical discussion, and radical change. While our original invitation email was perhaps an unfinished document prone to misinterpretation like any other, it was written in an expectation of dialogue and solidarity from the receiver, through which miscommunications could be alleviated.

A lot has happened right after February 2020 (both to the world and our project), such as the COVID-19 pandemic, global Black Lives Matter protests, and many others. One thing that has been important, and is even more important now, is maintaining a critical discourse where communication and disagreements are handled with care, attention, and generosity. Meaningful structural change toward an anti-racist, anti-extractivist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist world—values to which our project is fully committed—necessitates even more attention and care for our habits of communication with one another as we imagine ways to think and live together. We hope that by acknowledging this miscommunication, we urge everyone to rethink our collective values and take a stance toward a future like that.

Curatorial Team

____________

1
https://medium.com/@eraycayli/on-the-document-titled-gmail-subtitle-footnote-invitation-2020-venice-biennale-architecture-as-928a65e2d40c

https://medium.com/@eraycayli/on-the-document-titled-gmail-subtitle-footnote-invitation-2020-venice-biennale-architecture-as-928a65e2d40c

About the author Eray Çaylı is a researcher and academic working on the spatial-visual politics of violence and disaster. He has published his work, among many articles, in Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey, İklimin Estetiği: Antroposen Sanatı ve Mimarlığı Üzerine Denemeler and Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe.