SONIC PROJECT X SAVE MOVIE
With President Recep Tayyip Erdogan monopolizing power and cracking down on dissent, politics is increasingly unavoidable in every battle - even those over sounds. Elif Yasemin Azaz, a contributor to MIT’s CoLab Radio and a member of the Turkish collective Architecture for All, has posted soundwalks online from Istanbul neighborhoods she believes are under threat from the government’s urban renewal program, which many see as a euphemism for gentrification and social engineering. The collective Emek Is Ours, Istanbul Is Ours contributed to sound maps on Cities and Memory’s global protest project - uploading audio of police violently breaking up a demonstration against the closure of a famous old movie theater in 2013.
Add new technology and economic trends into the mix and there is a widespread sense of loss and displacement - of buildings, spaces, entire neighborhoods, and unwanted people and their activities - which is reflected in sound. But now, it’s the sound of construction that often drowns out the city’s more organic strains. Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian government, led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), is busy razing and building at a furious rate as part of an unprecedented construction boom. Fire, earthquakes, migration and gentrification have each changed the city dramatically in the past. This sonic war is being fought across the nation, but unsurprisingly, Istanbul is home to the most pitched battles. The city is particularly noisy: The ezan calls out five times a day Bosporus ferries strike deep, mournful notes underneath impatient, nasal car horns boisterous hawkers and vendors shout in the streets. Yelmi may have lost the race to save the sounds of the iconic fish market for posterity, but she’s part of a growing number of field recordists battling daily to preserve Turkey’s unique sonic heritage in the face of dramatic shifts that are threatening that legacy. It gives me a strange sense of happiness to know that nature will finally win.Įmre Yücelen, musician and sound recorder