CANSU YILDIRAN - FATHOM
"In their ongoing photographic series 'Fathom', Yıldıran portrays a community of queer artists they met during the 2020 TAPA (Transformative Art Project for Activists) residency in Turkey. This small community had the shared experience of being cruelly othered. Still, their stories about their daily lives and how they learned to live happily or exist bittersweetly within their own contexts were nevertheless very divergent. Yıldıran started photographing them, as friends and peers, during nightly sessions. Every photograph shows an individual with a name and an intimate story, who opened up and bonded with Yıldıran. Their work is the result of co-creation, a collaborative and performative practice, which relies on the enchanting results of improvisation and spontaneity. Yıldıran and their friends act wildly, as imaginary creatures, in a way that comes very close to Jack Halberstam’s definition of wildness as a space of disorder that expands after (or with) collapse, as the potential to break loose from the chains of modernity and binary capitalist culture (Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Duke University Press, 2020). The persons in the photographs become personas; performed versions of who they want to be and how they want to be seen beneath their surface lives. As is the case for other works in their practice, Yıldıran is seeking to create a home, a nest for a body, a community, a culture, a history through and with their photography. No amount of fathoms can suffice to measure the depth of someone’s identity. Therefore, Yıldıran and friends found solace in the creation of their own queer mythologies. They are the lubunya (queer in lubunca slang) who play in the night, stripping naked and shedding their skin, changing colours, painting the town red as they go, and creating light with burning and sputtering fires to light each other’s paths — to give hope. They learned how to hold their heads high and keep their voices low. They learned how to write their own tales and perform them. Making these queer mythologies together is not a way to defend a long past, but to imagine a queer future. As José Esteban Muñoz wrote tellingly in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009):
‘The future is queerness’s domain. … The here and now is a prison house. … we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. … Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’."
(excerpt from Zeynep Kubat's text on Fathom for Foam Magazine's Talent issue, 2024)
