Research Information System
Presentation, pp.13, 2022
My grandfather’s bright brown-red wooden pipe, which turned his white beard yellow, was carried in his pocket for years. He used to fill its tiny slot with tobacco every day, with smoke coming out of the end… right next to it, the tobacco storage container resembling a treasure chest with its niello-embroidered silver lid… Made of wool that my grandmother had hand-painted.
When they were alone with my grandfather, he lifted the glass cover and put the pointy end of the tiny needle on a black record and listened to the music while he glided like a dancing skater… the close friend of the turntable, the sullen-looking grill radio with its bone button and lace headscarf… The glass cabinet in the corner of our living room that no one stops by. Silent guests of the cabinet with shelves…the objects of the traces of the past, like the keepers of time…the pocket watch with a chain left from my father on a lower shelf…I watch the travellers of time in Malatya accompanied by a white snow cover.
After the guests have left, I watch with the same sadness years later. They are like guests from another world, they are watching us, our time travel. We get used to them in deep silence. Our longing for those who have left is replaced by the objects we protect with respect. When the life process in which we came to the world, stayed and migrated comes to an end, we witness that the objects left behind from our lives survive longer than we do.
Well, what if there is no object left from those who come and go as guests? There are many objects in our memory from childhood that we can see when we close our eyes. Can we transform the abstract markers encoded by the mind into concrete objects through our hands?
Let’s watch and listen concretely to the story of Abdullah, who, as a six-year-old boy, decided to keep his memories from being erased from his mind
Denizli is one of the cities with weaving factories (Sümerbank) whose foundations were laid in the Republican era in Turkey. People born, raised or have family roots in the cities where these factories are located are friends with weaving.