Re-Imag(in)ing Diyarbakir: Image, Archive, and the Production of Place

Abstract

To speak of a Kurdish visual archive refers to a territorially fragmented space in which images are held across globally dispersed locations within private and institutional collections that are displayed or housed in various formats and on different platforms. Often wrought through shifting dynamics of power, the parallel generation of gaps concerning whose voices and which experiences are made visible in relation to the past is raised. The dispersal of the archive thus presents a problem in terms of how place in Kurdistan has been produced by differing colonial and nationalist imaginaries. Examining two moments in (audio-)visual practice in the local ‘archival’ context of Diyarbakir (the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century and the 2000s), the thesis draws on a critical geographical approach to observe how the ‘sense of place’ within the urban context of Diyarbakir has been constituted through the technologies and experiences of making and their subsequent representational form. The thesis asks whether a re-engagement with the archive can elucidate stories of hegemony and appropriation in ways that can lead to the retrieval of knowledge or spark forms of challenge and critique? And what possibilities remain for the untold or unacknowledged stories that exist beyond nation-state archiving practices?