works / / / 2026
untitled / / / ongoing project
a haloed room
evdeyken
RUINS
Contact
a haloed room / / / ongoing project with Keyla Çavdar
I mourn therefore I am, I am—dead with the death of the other, my relation to myself is first of all plunged into mourning, a mourning that is moreover impossible. / Jacques Derrida
Consider the darkness and the great cold. In this vale which resounds with mystery. / Bertold Brech
It began with a discussion about graves. We had shared our work with each other, and through this dialogue, seen that both of us were creating from a realm of grief and melancholy. In our families, death always felt hidden. Neither of us had seen the graves of our grandfathers. Yet death was around us.
The dead come to us in dreams, in different forms, their voices may call out to us with the wind. Loss inhabits us, like a ghost. Maybe we are trying to come to terms with our dead, trying to find them in the recesses of memory, hear their voices, catch their gaze. It is also our own elusive relationship with loss that we are trying to digest. We began to ask: what is the place from which we are speaking when we speak about grief? It is as if our temporality is inextricably tied to a melancholic consciousness. Does our geography possess a grieving identity? Is this entanglement sprouted from our soil? How does this melancholy, this grief, shape us?
These questions led us to explore the labyrinthine effects of death’s detachment from nature and tradition, its politicization, its transformation into a political action, both on social memory and identity, and on an individual’s relationship with their own life, their own history. These mutations seem to have resulted in the impossibility of ‘mourning rituals’, fracturing the already fragile process of grief and ultimately hindering the creation of an image which holds memory.
This relation between image and memory brings us back to graves. “Tombstones raise the memory of the deceased who lies beneath… Each grave, each tomb is a small place of worship”, writes Zeynep Sayın in Ölüm Terbiyesi. What happens when we cannot bury our dead, when dying is ridden with haunting? In order to deepen our understanding of the aforementioned experiences, we begin with three stories: Ali Rıza Arslan, whose son was killed during conflicts in Diyarbakır in 2015, receiving his son’s bones in a bag, the almost mythological story of a fig tree leading to the body of Ahmet Cemal who was killed in 1974 in Cyprus and thrown into a cave, and the bodies of the relatives of the residents of the doomed Hasankeyf which were exhumed and reburied before its flooding.
We would like to view this project as a kind of emotional archaeology. Our intention is not to engage with these stories as our materials, but as ‘sites’ in a landscape of grief. In an archeological framework, artefacts, bones, bodies, may be regarded as ‘mute evidence’; they have no ‘voice’ yet are in themselves imbued with meaning, a patient meaning that is in waiting, and it is the task of the living, who act as translators, to decipher their histories. Perhaps we will create a map of this “archaeological site”, a dictionary of its “terms”, an encyclopedia that can be inhabited or dwelled in. Our idea is to materialize, or at least attempt to materialize, the psychic space of grief. The act of creating in and with this notion could also be viewed as participating in, or trying to restore, mourning rituals. A grave is not just a space one goes to visit their dead, it is also a space where one goes to sit with their dead, read next to them, be with them, as if in their house. The state of mourning initiates a kind metamorphosis. The rituals of this life continue, they do not end with mourning, they only take on different forms.