”Eye of the Mountain” by Savas Boyraz

I am trying to understand why I can’t speak my mother tongue. More precisely, why my mother tongue is not my first language. Like any question, it has a short answer and a long one. Short answer is; My mother tongue is not a recognised language in the country I grew up. Long answer is this artistic research. 

The research, until now, took me into various fields of knowledge; from semantics to ornithology, from prehistory to analogue sound recording techniques, from martial arts to speculative fiction. 
Here are some more questions I encountered:
What is the ecological impact of war?
How do Machine, Animal and Human relate to each other in a colonial context.
How can a language, that is denied recognition as a “human language” by the colonial machine, establish legitimacy on a universal scale? 
If a language was a mountain, how deep would it be?

Eye of the Mountain aims to unfold the reflection of nature on colonial military practises, as well as on various modes of resistance. 
The design history of military technologies is decorated with taxidermies of appropriated and assimilated life forms. This appropriation spans from biomechanical imitation to representational evisceration. 
Looking at the ecological impact of military operations and observing the disappearance and displacement of several species, we can identify these war machines as an engineered generation of colonial invasive species.
For people, nature emerges as a platform upon which their resistance is imagined and performed. Contrary to a biomechanical appropriation, nature gets translated into the human body. Bodily and vocal reflections of animals through folk dances and traditional singing styles, and the role of these practices in composing a cultural self-defence are other focal points of the research.

Savas Boyraz’s 50% seminar 15-16 February 

Read about Savas Boyraz’s 50% seminar