Sound as Material in Semra Ertan (Cana Bilir-Meier 2013): A Methods Discussion[1]
Kristina Pia Hofer
Encounter
“Begegnung. Woher könnte ich den wissen, dass du mich liebst, wenn deine Augen nicht sprechen würden? Wie könnte ich denn sowas denken?”[2] The German filmmaker Cana Bilir-Meier reads the opening lines of Semra Ertan’s poem Begegnung (1979), “Encounter,” a little more than halfway through her film Semra Ertan (2013). The artist’s voice sounds out distinctly from a soundtrack that is otherwise very quiet at this moment: no ambience, no music here. Gentle distortions, effected by miniscule digital artefacts, cue with the speaker’s enunciation, and seem to come from within: a pop at the end of a word here, a faint metallic ring shooting off a letter B there. Bilir-Meier speaks at a measured pace, unhurriedly; she adds a slight pause at the end of her, of Etan’s, word. Begegnung. Pause.
The poet Semra Ertan was born in Mersin, Turkey, in 1957, moved to North Germany as the child of so-called “Gastarbeiter” (guest laborer)[3] parents in 1971, and died in Hamburg, Germany, in 1982. As “dichtende Arbeiterin” (worker poet) (Bilir-Meier and Bilir-Meier 2020: 8), Ertan completed over 350 poems in Turkish and German while supporting herself as a technical draftswoman and translator. Save for a few, her poems remained unpublished during her lifetime. As a political activist, both on the streets and in her writing, she rallied for the social, political, and cultural participation for subjects who, like herself, found themselves minoritized by Othering ascriptions in Germany as well as in Turkey (Bilir-Meier and Bilir-Meier 2020: 6, 8). On 24 May 1982, at 25 years old, Ertan set herself on fire in a Hamburg street. The night before, she had announced her self-immolation as a political act, calling out the racism of a system that classified humans as “Ausländer” (foreigners)[4] in order to exploit their labor power with reckless disregard for their dignity, economic security, and mental and physical health (Bilir-Meier 2017: 7). Her statements are on record with the public broadcast institutions NDR (Northern German Broadcasting) and ZDF (Second German Television) (Bilir-Meier 2017: 7). Semra Ertan died in hospital on 26 May 1982.
Cana Bilir-Meier is Semra Ertan’s niece. They never met during Ertan’s lifetime. In her film Semra Ertan, Bilir-Meier engages with Ertan’s life, death, poetry, and political ideas – not in the form of a documentary, but in the experimental, lyrical format of an essay film. Niece and aunt meet here, in the film: Begegnung. As a filmmaker, Bilir-Meier makes space for the weight of the term, her tone both soft and strong as she lets the word drop: Begegnung, pause. She also makes space for letting anyone who listens perceive the tactility of this encounter. Begegnung: here are a voice and a word that have texture, body, grain. A surface and a volume. Resonance and pitch. Tactility of voice, of sound, resounds in the image track. I see handwritten words in notebooks and on the dotted lines of forms. Wads of newsprint, folded over, crinkled, yellowed, worn; visibly touched, as time has passed, by hands, light, humid and dry air. Binders with frayed covers. An analog photo print of Semra Ertan’s face, cut to an oval shape with slightly uneven edges; its magnetic focus: Ertan’s eyes. Like the eyes in Ertan’s poem, hers are eyes that talk: but, for now, they also withhold sound. The camera holds close enough for me to almost reach, while the soundtrack holds its breath like I hold mine, pausing at this moment, marking an instant of expectation: interstice before touch. In the pause, in the soundtrack’s quiet, I hear myself, as a bodily presence: the pebble crunch of teeth on teeth (as I close my mouth), the fleshy bounce in my throat (as I swallow). Then Bilir-Meier speaks. Her voice is warm as it brushes against me: Begegnung, she says. Does she implicate me as a listener? Does she call me to also meet her, to also meet Ertan, in the space she opens up in her film? And what is my place in this encounter?
For this paper, I approach Bilir-Meier's film accompanied by a methodological proposition from contemporary (Western European) sound studies, namely Salomé Voegelin's suggestion that “knowledge generated in [sonic] practice opens the possibility for vague, mobile, and contingent understandings that challenge the privilege and certainty of existing concepts of categories of the real” (Voegelin 2021: 271-2). In other words, I bring with me the suggestion that sonic relationing – via a direct, tactile, affectively rich, and personal experience of sonic textures as material – can facilitate contact beyond the power imbalances, differentializations, and epistemological erasures that structure the empirical world as it is now. For the sake of clarity, I want to disclose right away that I am critical of this suggestion: unlike many of the influential recent voices in sonic materialisms (obviously, Voegelin 2021, but also Cox 2011), I am not convinced that relationing via the sonic transcends what Stuart Hall (1997) has famously termed “politics of representation.” Still, I want to method (if I can use the term as a verb for a moment) materially – as Bilir-Meier’s work warrants such a methoding, for reasons that will become apparent below.
In what follows, I will be reversing the positivist notion of testing methods on material, and of treating artworks (and my experience of relationing to them) as data that simply needed to be processed. Instead of examining Bilir-Meier’s invitation to encounter Semra Ertan and her poetry in and through film (and film sound) according to the rules of materialist sonic methodology, I will ask how sonic methodologies can learn from the sonic materialities the artist deploys in her work. Taking Semra Ertan’s sonic textures seriously as agents that shape the reality of our encounter, I’ll be listening out in particular for cautions they might help me to formulate vis-à-vis European sound studies’ optimistic suggestion that sonic relationing can be hierarchy-free.[5]
This paper, then, asks if, and how, sonic methodologies that are inspired by sound art, that grasp sound as material, and that engage the researcher’s own perceptions of sonic textures as means of producing academic knowledge can be apt tools to approach audiovisual artworks concerned with questions of representation and participation from a minoritarian point of audition – in particular, when the researcher who does the listening represents a Dominanz background. This is exactly the case when I, as a white, middle class, Austrian academic and native German speaker, who works at a Viennese art school, meet the poetry of Semra Ertan in Cana Bilir-Meier’s film.
Dominanz is a term I borrow from German-language critical migration studies and anti-racist activism to name those populations that Western European political discourse presents as unmarked “majority” citizen inhabitants of a given nation state. To belong to a Dominanz population often means having one’s presence in one’s country be regarded as the norm, as justified and self-explanatory: one belongs. Dominanz, as a term, draws attention to the unequal power relations that the privileging of this group of inhabitants over others necessarily entails. In Western Europe, the Dominanz citizen’s racialized Other is “the migrant” – or, more accurately within the context in which Ertan lived and worked, the “Ausländer” – whose personal and/or family history of transnational mobility challenges homogenizing notions of national belonging. From a Dominanz point of view, the “Ausländer” can never really belong (Attia, Köbsell and Prasad 2015).
The theme of being made to unbelong in 1970s and early 1980s West German Dominanz society, and how to fight against it, looms large in Semra Ertan’s artistic and political work (Doughan 2022: 62). Though never essentializing the differentiation that separates and hierarchizes Dominanz and migrant subjects in the context in which she lives, works and writes in, the poet makes clear that these subjects do not share equal positions in public knowledge-making processes, that their perspectives often differ in important questions, and that both their positions are partial; in Donna Haraway’s (1988) words: that they are situated, and therefore power-differentiated. Cana Bilir-Meier, in her 2013 remediation of her aunt’s private/artistic estate and of the traces she left in (West) German Dominanz media archives, sounds out a transhistorical agentiality of Ertan’s work and voice in present-day antiracist art and activism (Doughan 2022: 63). Bilir-Meier’s work, too, probes deeply into processes of racialization and Othering in German knowledge making via media, both historical and contemporary; always asking how migranticized subjects have claimed, and still claim, their right and ability to live, work, produce art, and memorialize the histories that are meaningful to them at their own terms (Bilir-Meier 2016; Güleç 2018).
As stated above, I meet Ertan’s poetry, and Bilir-Meier’s film, as a Dominanz listener. Situatedness, both personally and structurally, is a question of gravity in this encounter. The sonic methods I am (con)testing here, however, insist that when in “sonic sensibility,” sounding/listening agents may attune to each other “as interbeings: as beings with and of each other and other things, whose meaning and sense derive from this lived co-laboration [sic]” (Voegelin 2021: 271). How, then, does a method concerned with sonic materiality – and with my perception of it – carry the weight of differentiated situatedness? Does it?
Below, I will trace how Bilir-Meier’s film Semra Ertan has invited me to try my hand at a materially based figurative interpretation. I lay out in detail how I engage with particular material qualities as haptic sonic textures in order to associate them with specific aspects of the political message the film otherwise communicates on a textual level. Figurative, in this context, means that my method builds meaning with, not from, the material qualities of sounds. Calling my method figurative, I want to amplify that this meaning does not come from the sonic textures themselves and alone, or that their materiality somehow carried and contained such meaning. Rather, I mean to signpost that the meaning I make is a product of me perceiving materiality and history together. I get to it from sounding an aesthetic likeness, correspondence, and/or resonance between the material qualities I encounter (in a haptic and tactile fashion) when listening, and the quality of narrated human experiences that I learn about (in a more abstract way) when reading a text. I do so by close listening to both the artist and her work. For this paper, I have spent time sitting and thinking with Semra Ertan (the film), with Bilir-Meier’s written reflections on Semra Ertan’s and her own artistic work (2016; 2018), with Ertan’s poetry (as anthologized by Zühal and Cana Bilir-Meier for edition assemblage in 2020), and with the transcript of a personal conversation that Cana Bilir-Meier generously agreed to hold with me in June 2022. I will address the concrete interpretative form that my feeling for sonic materiality takes and how it situates me as an intertextual listening subject, one who stays connected to a world of words even in the moment of close physical, sonic encounter: it matters what I have read in regard to Semra Ertan’s personal story and about the history of migrant labor in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Historical context and political meaning-making, I will argue, co-shape the associations I gravitate towards as I meet the physical sonicity of Bilir-Meier’s work. I further argue that, as a Dominanz subject, I need to learn from both the textual and the sensual cues Bilir-Meier’s film presents.
Of my sonic encounter with Semra Ertan, I ask:
How can one bring a sensitivity for sonic materialities into an analysis of Bilir-Meier’s film and remain responsive to the importance of situatedness that the work calls upon?
More precisely:
How can I bring a sensitivity for sonic materialities into my analysis of Bilir-Meier’s film?
How can I communicate in which ways the sonicity of Bilir-Meier’s artistic strategies has moved me to interpretation – and what does this being-moved-ness give back to my own academic thinking about sonic methodology?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly: how will I remain responsive to differences in situatedness, as they emerge in my sonic encounter with the work, while also processing sound textures into meaning through my own listening body?