Companion Plants, Entrusted Stones
An interview with Gözde Ilkin
by Andria Nyberg Forshage
My first question is about the materials you use in your work. I understand that you often work with found textiles, everyday fabrics used in homes. What has your process looked like when it comes to sourcing materials in this case, and what are their significance?
In my working process, I collect stories of humans and stories of the ground, as well as fabrics, handcrafted covers, plants, and pieces of nature from the geographies I visit. I work by following the stains, odors and usage patterns on textile fabrics. They bear the traces of relationships, handicrafts, production, and sharing inside and outside the home. I consider every piece I collect more as stories and records from the life entrusted to me, rather than as material for my production.
With support from the Autostrada team, we shared my working process and the relationships I built through fabrics with people living in Prizren. Accompanying them were questions of how we convey our personal stories, intangible narratives and words through objects. Through which fabrics and motifs do we tell our belonging and our story? We asked for family stories and fabric materials they wanted to share. The process became visible with covers embroidered by the dear mothers of [Autostrada Biennale co-founders] Vatra and Leo, along with fabrics from different people, and the stories that were conveyed.
With every piece I received, I had the chance to touch the landscape, people, and feelings of Prizren. With every piece I was entrusted, I reconstructed the landscape of this geography with its plants, stone, mountains, rivers, and human forms. The works were shaped by the forms and feelings where the meetings of each piece of the landscape, each stone, the water, the bodies and fabrics make up a shared memory entrusted to each other.
The title of your work is Companion Plants, Entrusted Stones. You work with plants as motifs as well as materials, both through natural dyes and fabrics which, like cotton or linen, come from plants. How do you see the relation — the companionship — between the figure, the motif, in your work, and the material itself?
The fabrics I collect are living archives that transmit the signatures of people of different lives, from generation to generation. I create works by first preserving motifs embroidered by hand and attaching them to each other. Working on fabrics with motifs and scents from different lives helps me sustain the invisible links between past and present. I record the traces of plants that keep the archive of the place and geography, while I transform people on the fabrics. In this process, the fabrics, motifs, plants, handicrafts, and figures inspired by plants are different forms of the same memory. Each piece becomes a metamorphosis of each other through the stories they entrust to one another.
In the pictures you have sent me from your studio in Istanbul I see you working together with your mother. Please tell me more about your collaboration and what it means for you, perhaps in terms of memory and trust, and in relation to the politics of women’s (reproductive, domestic) labour and art that you allude to in your work.
Embroidering, talking, and working with my mother, Ayşe Ilkin, is a unique process. It’s one we share through fabrics. Together we give birth to fabrics, stories of the past, figures and forms which we embroider by hand in each and every process. We can talk about it as a kind of domestic activism in which we mutually discover the process of how to work together. Our process concerns that which is invisible in the times and places we live. We learn patterns, learn about different lives and stories, break it down and reproduce it together, between my mother and me
When we think about fabrics and stories together, we get out of the mother-daughter relationship. We experience a collective working and learning process wherein two women share their life processes and experiences with each other. Most importantly, we experience a means of working and processing in which we rewrite our family history, our own history, in each project and collaboration.
I am struck by your images of ordinarily-dressed people sprouting leaves for heads, turning into rocks, melting together and forming new bodies. Very often these shapes take the place where the individual face would be. How do you come upon these shapes? How would you describe them and, perhaps, how they can affect the ways we imagine identity?
I trace the gaps between the human and the non-human. My inspiration comes from museums, archaeological histories, similar and abstract forms of human, animal, plant and stone formations. Knowledge from the past, similarities between human and animal motifs and figures, the erasure of the face, and how body parts are defined and shaped by hand — all of it inspire the forms that I use in my works. Starting from our need for a common memory, in which all animate and inanimate beings converge with the erasure of the face, we can talk about amorphous forms and bodies combined with parts of nature. They form a rhizomatic structure in which every animate and inanimate part is rooted to each other. In Companion Plants and Entrusted Stones, we trace a common landscape where plants, stones, rivers, and figures of them intertwine without losing their characters, and where each root touches each other to create an identity.
Your works here are displayed on buildings throughout Prizren. What has your process been like in terms of working with public space, when it comes to for instance moving from the intimate scale, such as in sewing by hand and working with materials from homes, to the exterior?
When I came to Prizren for research, I witnessed the multi-layered structure of the city while we were traveling on the Biennale route. In this city, different places and personal narratives in different languages seem to be giving birth to each other. I thought of the faces of buildings, especially the oldest buildings, as knitted with different motifs and physical features, forming memory cracks where past stories and experiences accumulate. The multicultural hybrid nature of the buildings, architectural motifs, languages spoken and plants in the region all intellectually overlapped with the layered memory of the second-hand, domestic fabrics that I use in my works. This process led to the opening up of domestic memory to the outside, to the street.
With support from the Autostrada team and curators, I had the chance to do short interviews on vital narratives, places and vegetation. Through this process I was inspired by endemic plants used for healing, stones and structures that hold the memory of the city, as well as visuals and photographs from past periods. While contemplating how the unarchivable and the invisible make up different forms of resistance, I produced forms in the landscape of this geography. Here, the stories of mountains, rivers, plants, stones and people intersect, and are all metamorphoses of each other.
We can only accompany stories when we not only witness, not only know, but feel them. The images I embroidered on fabrics and covers from Prizren, which I entrusted to my family, became visible as three fabric works. In them, memories of different lives held by domestic stories, plants, stones and landscapes are interwoven. They’re inspired by the common memory and the transformative relationship of occurrences in nature, which come to life by settling in each other's spaces. Together, they can be considered as an archival work in which intertwined languages, architectural structures and cultures are staged on fabrics, accompanied by oral narratives.
Between the plant and the stone, the domestic and the public, the soft and the hard, I sense in your work a way of playing with contrasts that go beyond binary oppositions — perhaps as a form of queering. How would you say queerness might figure in your work+ And how do you think about it in relation to the world outside the human, such as the plant or the rock?
Exactly as you describe: interior and exterior, private and public, plant and stone, you and me — the state of interior fabrics transforming into works of art by preserving its definition and identity. That is, it happens through the state of being born from each other and sinking into each other, intertwining, without one to the loss of the meaning of the other, while navigating within the framework of this identity and belonging.
I’m inspired by how plants develop strategies for vital continuity, creating points of resistance and establishing fraternity in place of absence. These transformations, the merging and flowing states of every living thing, make up the surface of the earth. I can explain queer existence as forms that can transform from one to the other while preserving their uniqueness, creating their own metamorphosis.
In my production process post-university, I started wandering into an area in which I erased the faces from figurative works. Instead, we might define bodies with space and costumes, where human and animal existence intertwine. I did this in fabric works, and in the choreographed pieces that I produced for performances. These are forms that are completely abstract, but they’re turned into choreographic objects that open and transform with the performance and a moving body.
