Semra Ertan’s Sonic Acts
Semra Ertan has been much noted for finding a circumspect and highly self-reflexive artistic language speaking history from a “migrant situated knowledge” point of audition (Güleç 2018: 33; see also Doughan 2022: 66). Most of its seven-minute run time comprises a collage-like remediation of visual, audiovisual and audio material from the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the materials come from Ertan’s personal estate: notes, finished pieces of writing, photos, and personal documents left by the poet that her family has kept in a box for three decades and taken across the border to store in their home in Turkey (Bilir-Meier 2016: 108, 2017: 6-7; Doughan 2022: 65). Other materials Bilir-Meier has culled from official German Dominanz archives, most prominently, a ten-minute TV feature that the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln) produced and broadcast nationally in 1982. These materials other and exoticize Semra Ertan: they sensationalize her death without naming her name (Bilir-Meier 2016).
The two sets of archival materials Bilir-Meier engages in her film sound Ertan’s diasporic situatedness in Germany in the 1980s from two very different speaking positions. The personal documents speak of Ertan’s own “desires and dreams” (Doughan 2022: 64), her political views and visions, her refusal to accept the marginalized, racialized position that the ascription of the status of “Ausländer” would assign to her (Bilir-Meier 2016; Bilir-Meier & Bilir-Meier 2020; Doughan 2022; see also Kourabas 2021: 100-101). The Dominanz materials demonstrate exactly those formulaic limitations that 1980s hegemonic discourse and (mass) medial representation placed on subjects they categorized as “Ausländer” (Bilir-Meier 2016: 109, 111; Doughan 2022: 62; see also Kourabas 2021: 233, 272-273). In her film, Bilir-Meier presents both types of material alongside each other as well as interwoven. Her artistic treatment of them, however, differs significantly. The artist gives the personal material ample space to voice and word a nuanced diasporic subjecthood. In contrast, she subjects the Dominanz material to a series of deliberately harsh cuts that break voiceover and commentary into a kaleidoscope of jagged shards, thereby poignantly dissecting its reductive, racist representational strategies (Bilir-Meier 2016: 110).
Ayşe Güleç (2018), Sultan Doughan (2022), and not least Bilir-Meier herself (2016, 2017) have discussed in detail how working with the Bilir family archive has enabled the filmmaker to bring attention to what Semra Ertan – as a diasporic artistic and political subject – had to say, to how her estate provides historical information that is missing in Dominanz accounts, and to how the message of Ertan’s artistic and political legacy resonates transhistorically with postmigrant antiracist activism and artistic production in Germany today. As an artist who also works as a teacher, Bilir-Meier understands her film as fulfilling a representational function: she wants to “create counter-images”[6] that recall the resistance and unruliness of migrant subjects in 1970s and 1980s Germany, which dominant discourses of remembrance often tend to forget.[7]
At the same time, Bilir-Meier’s work stands out in terms of the sonic materialities it engages. This is not a biopic; only during its closing minute does the film share concrete information about its protagonist and namesake.[8] Following film theoretician Laura Rascaroli’s definition, it is safe to say that Semra Ertan displays – and sounds out – the “interstitial” audiovisual logic of the genre of the essay film: Bilir-Meier’s piece finds its meaning in “the gaps” between sounds and images, and perhaps even more so in the gaps between its varied, intricately layered sounds (Rascaroli 2017: 122, 131). In order to facilitate the sonic encounters it intends to invite, the film arranges the different sonic textures of the archival material into “a space based on disjunction rather than on seamless suturing” (Rascaroli 2017: 122), which leaves room for tensions and correspondences across historical time. Three poems of Ertan’s structure the film into three acts, each of them appearing in an equally haptic but sonically different mode.
Act 1 opens with Unheimlich Glücklich (1977), staging the poem word for word in Ertan’s handwriting. The soundtrack registers as silent; more precisely, it bears neither recorded signal nor audible distortion. Still, its stillness pulses as the words pulse on screen: this is a silence in syncopation. The message of the poem – sie ist unglücklich, weil sie kein Heim hat – is present, but I cannot yet hear it. What I sense, sonically, is a pulsation that urges: it wants to sound out.[9] Act 2 responds: here is Ertan’s voice, reading her poem Mein Name ist Ausländer (1981) to a West German public broadcaster the night before her political suicide. A hiss permeates her speech. Other hisses – softer, sharper, similar in shape – join as the audio recording of her voice layers with the soundtrack of the 1982 WDR program exploiting her death. I hear the rims and glue of this collage rendered audible in faint traces of Bilir-Meier’s editing: short fades as tracks cut into each other, muffled squeals from when tape was paused, dampened clicks from when a recording was stopped. Act 3 meets Ertan in the presence: Bilir-Meier reads Begegnung. No more collaging here: Bilir-Meier’s voice speaks against a quiet backdrop; amplifying the tiny distortions that emerge as she enunciates.
I propose that it matters that the artist chose to meet her aunt’s estate in palpable cuts and hisses and that she engages with these particular archival materials in terms of their physical substance, as materials that touch. While I concur with Doughan’s observation that Ertan’s estate – and thus also Bilir-Meier’s film – “pulses with the plea to be heard” (Doughan 2022: 64, italics in original), I would like to suggest that Semra Ertan also presents this plea as a pulse, that is, as an insistent, physical reminder that this archive is expressive and even alive in and through its bodily materiality, and that this materiality deserves as much care and attention as the content it carries.
I do so for two reasons. For one, I follow here Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Perez’ caution against limiting one’s critical understanding of minoritarian artists (and their work) as merely “testifying to the sociological conditions of their own disempowerment,” and treating them as “tasked with producing art that transmits information rather than pushing aesthetic boundaries” (Amin, Musser, and Perez 2017: 227). Bilir-Meier explicitly names her film an artistic encounter: a place and time in the present, in which her filmmaking and Ertan’s poetry meet (Bilir-Meier 2016: 112). As an artistic encounter, I am convinced that this film merits analysis as an artwork – that is, it merits a close engagement with its formal and aesthetic qualities. Bilir-Meier’s film invites a haptic approach that contributes to a negotiation of history from a minoritarian point of audition: it allows for savoring the tactile, textural, and sensuous dimensions of one’s encounter with Ertan’s legacy in ways that exceed a rehearsal of facts. I propose that Bilir-Meier, and Semra Ertan, mobilize texture and touch in ways that resonate as meaningful, both in their aesthetic form and in their representational
address.
Second, I hope to show how my listening to, with, and alongside Bilir-Meier’s sonic-material artistic strategies can contribute to the discussion of how to “situat[e] sonic thinking” (Vieira de Oliveira 2020: 73). Taking seriously questions of situatedness, I am interested in how methods that seek to address sonic materialities on their own terms can ground: how can they also acknowledge the larger structural, empirical, historical, discursive, epistemological power relations that physical encounters in sound take place in? Such grounding is especially important when engaging speculative, new materialist sonic methods (Goh 2017; Thompson 2017). Reperforming what Jonathan Sterne (2003: 15) calls “the audiovisual litany,” new materialist approaches often frame sound/hearing as intrinsically intimate, transformative, and benevolently devoid of structural epistemological violence. Vision/looking, in contrast, appears as an always and necessarily distancing sense that privileges the status quo and the power one holds over another. As one result of this split, new materialist sonic thinking frequently characterizes inquiries of a seemingly old materialist cut – for instance, into media histories, the politics of representation, and unjust histories – as concerns of visuality alone. Instead, they favor tracing political potentiality in the ostensibly “indivisible” (Voegelin 2021: 270) and direct encounters of sounding and listening agents in the present and in presence. As many authors before me have contended, such insistence that sound and vision, in themselves, have unalterable, ahistorical, and mutually exclusive material (and relational) qualities reproduces Western (Vieira de Oliveira 2020: 73), Global North (Steingo and Sykes 2019), white (Thompson 2017), gendered/racialized (Goh 2017), ableist (Thompson 2021), and/or settler colonial (Robinson 2020) epistemologies. Bilir-Meier’s remediation of her aunt’s estate, I propose, invites and enacts a sonic sensibility beyond such sensorial splitting. Taking her cue, I argue, can thus provide crucial impulses for my own sonic methodologies.