OĞULCAN ARSLAN - PEARL

They were, following their domestication, creatures providing mankind’s travels and communication on the first hand. Nowadays, while everyone can communicate with smartphones or applications even from hundreds of thousands kilometers away, it may be hard to imagine but for a very long time words coming from good tidings or bad news, people’s dreams or thoughts were loaded on horses and reached their destinations.
Even though the important roles of horses in daily lives changed with the invention of steam engines, still speaking about engine capacity as ‘horsepower’ points out the continuous role in the semantic world. The intimacy between horses and their owners at Burgazada, İstanbul resonates the close bonds of the past.
Horses, while they don’t carry people from one place to another, after waking up and eating their first meal of the day, are released from their barns and until 6 PM freely walk around the island. From the impressions I got during my observations, their minds are at their barns and thus they don’t get too far from where they internalise as home, their stillness explains their momentary freedom.
While the news about banning the horse carriages and bringing electric carriages instead all through the Prince’s Islands are on the agenda, it’s inevitable for ‘Pearl’, the first horse that I met and made contact with, take the leading role in my photographic story. In Pearl’s eyes, there are traces of centuries-old helpfulness of their archaic companionships as well as innocence, sensitivity and sensuality.
Given the name Pearl, which is a substance that can be found as a whole in nature, doesn’t need to be processed or polished and in that sense can be associated with wisdom, is a justification of this centenary friendship in a way.