gülbahar or Svitlena

going public 06_formigine / italy

When embarking upon field survey in İstanbul, the city of constant flows, the first thing that come to my mind was “what is the thing that doesn’t flow?” and the things or persons that this flow made invisible. Then, these thoughts led me to women…

I am making little trips in the city by carrying the issue in my mind, and I find myself in a vicinity called Küçükbakkalköy, far away from the downtown, that reminds me of a huge open building site. I am approaching a pink house at the end of an empty land. A friend of mine had told me that I would meet an Ukrainian woman there. I am thinking how to explain her the reason of my being there, since the only thing I have is the question in my mind. Once we introduce ourselves, my nervousness fades away. She is quite comfortable, beginning to tell her story. Telling me her name; Gülbahar. Then I am seeing the picture; she was told that as from then, her name was Gülbahar. And we are briefly and sincerely explaining our lives that made us sitting there together. She is more like summarizing the difficulties and coincidences in chronological order.

As we spend time together, we are learning the details of each other’s lives. She is telling me how Svitlana gradually became Gülbahar: She had come to İstanbul 7 years ago to earn money with her shuttle trader uncle... The first separation from her son Sasha who she left to her mother in Ukraine. Things had gone bad, and she had broken with her uncle. She had not been able to return to Ukraine, as she had worked illicitly and had had no money. After a while, she is with her future partner. The waiter in the diner in Laleli where she had been lunching. “In the beginning I didn’t like him” she says. They had joined in religious marriage and Svitlana is becoming a Muslim woman named Gülbahar. Now they have two children, and she is carrying the third. Two children have no birth records, since Svitlana is an illicit immigrant in Turkey and they are not able to go to Ukraine. Therefore, the children cannot attend to school, as they aren’t “real persons”…

Through the photographs I shot and the songs I recorded, I attempted to pursue Svetlana in Gülbahar’s home. Traces of the nomadic woman abandoning her very self, her language even in private space and remembering all these as a sweet memories.

Photographs as a whole neither have a beginning nor an end as the story I listened. Consist of moments, the unflowings; fragments.

http://www.amaze.it/en/inside.html