Görkem Özdemir | Multimedia
Freedom of others, my fears

Die multimodalen Ergebnisse sind mit der Freiheit in dem Sinne verbunden, dass ich zwischen den Freiheitswünschen anderer stehe und mich selbst als Zeuge bei der Suche anderer nach Gerechtigkeit einsetze. Freiheit ist ein Konzept, genau wie andere von Menschen gemachte Konzepte. Dennoch ist sie miteinander verbunden wie ein Netzwerk. Sie ist endlos und kontinuierlich, vielleicht sogar zyklisch. An diesem Tag fühlte ich mich frei. Denn ich war damals nicht Teil der chaotischen Politik einer bestimmten Geografie. Allerdings war meine Freiheit durch die Suche der anderen nach Freiheit vorübergehend unterbrochen worden.

In 2011, I was in India as a design intern who was working in, and exploring the cultures and rituals of India. I am using the plurals on purpose because India is as big as a continent, approximately 4 times bigger than my home country Türkiye; 9 times bigger than Germany and 162 times bigger than Slovenia where I currently inhabit, and travel back and forth.

There were protests against the political corruption in India at that time. After the Stuttgart 21 protests in Germany, during the Arab Spring movement in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, just before the Taksim Gezi Protests in İstanbul. From a wider perspective, protests were about to emerge globally; mostly related to the expressions of freedom, liberty and independence in the public realm.

As I remember vaguely, rumors were all around. Even in our office, a name was being repeated every now and then. First, I thought the name was belonging to a female due to my Eurocentric perception. However, that was my main motivation to visit India, to break the indoctrination of “the west is the best” preconception. More importantly, the design education in Türkiye was also built on the narratives of Italian, Scandinavian, and even American ethos. In simpler words: the glorification of European and the USA material traditions. But what was going on in the ancient cultures of Asia? Such as Iran, Japan, China, and in our case India.

We were in New Delhi. On our way back to train station, a mass of people was gathering in a public space. A louder than usual din was apparent. While we were walking through the crowd, suddenly a flock of people started to run back and forth with flags, posters, sticks and flares in their hands. Of course, by shouting and cheering in a sense of unity … and whistling, too. We were inside the mixture of emotions, the rise of excitement, cheer, joy, uncanniness, restlessness, a slight concern, and many other sensations which I can’t remember or label now.

Maybe the police was chasing and controlling the crowd, I don’t know. But a thing was quite obvious, we were caught in the middle, and wanted to escape from that awkward situation. Intuitively, I pressed the record button of my newly purchased DSLR camera at that time. In that way, I captured an excerpt from the protest in video format. But I am not going to show it today. In this case, rather than an actual representation, it is more important to imagine and visualize by yourself. With your own resources of memory and imagination; regarding to your own experiences of protests and/or gatherings. My recording action was a purely intuitive one. It is a way of remembering and reminding the things to myself. Maybe it was to document the freedom of others as a person in fear and in a potential threat. Also, it might be an audio/visual document that protect our freedom of mobility to show to authorities that we were just passing by. For the last two decades, I believe the recording devices sometimes function as a weapon of defence or attack according to its context. Especially for the people on the street to alter or claim their reality.

I was a foreigner in a distant country, where I was visiting as a temporal laborer and not able to understand the context and the language. In such a coincidental event, you would never know in which side of the protest you are at… Against? For? Whose freedom? Freedom of what? Which freedom were we talking about? In my opinion it was best to witness, rather than take part in it as a stranger. And to archive. And to talk about it with others to communicate, connect and contact.

The relatively short video footage in loop, an abstract soundscape composition and a couple of highlighted/ censored photographs are connected with freedom in the sense of being in between the freedom wish of others and places myself as a witness in others’ search of justice. Freedom is a concept, just like other human-made concepts. Still, it is interconnected like a network. It is endless and continuous, and maybe even cyclical. We may realize this as the protests have happened in many places around the world, in the second decade of the 21st Century, just like a chain reaction. I was feeling free because I was not part of the messy politics of a certain geography at that time. Though, my freedom had been interrupted by the others’ search for freedom temporarily.