Taskafa

Country: Turkey

Related artists:

Duration & details: 66 min
Price & hire time: £3, $4 / 48hr
Language: Turkish and English with English subtitles

This presentation of Taskafa co-incides with Real Estates, a project by Fugitive Images (Andrea Luka Zimmerman and David Roberts) at PEER, London, 18 February – 28 March 2015.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman‘s works in the LUX Collection

Taskafa is an artist’s essay film about memory and the most necessary forms of belonging, both to a place and to history, through a search for the role played in the city by Istanbul’s street dogs and their relationship to its human populations. Through this exploration, the film opens a window on the contested relationship between power and the public, community and categorisation (in location and identity), and the ongoing struggle / resistance against a single way of seeing and being.

Despite several major attempts by Istanbul’s rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to erase them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with widespread civilian communities, which recognize and defend their right to co-exist.

Taskafa gathers the voices of diverse Istanbul residents, shopkeepers, and street based workers, all of whom display a striking commitment to the wellbeing and future of the city’s canine population (a community of street dogs, and cats, free of formal ownership but fed and cared for by numerous individuals). From the rapidly gentrifying city centre district of Galata to the residential islands of the Sea of Marmara, and beyond, Taskafa navigates a history of empathy with, and threats to this highly distinctive urban community.

Taskafa is structured around readings by internationally acclaimed storyteller, essayist, and critic John Berger, from his novel King, a story of hope, dreams, love and resistance, told from the perspective of a dog belonging to a community facing disappearance, even erasure. In Taskafa, this voice is gifted to a wider community and range of perspectives: to dogs, a city and, finally, to history.

John Berger’s text and delivery take the viewer on a journey from Karakoy to Hayirsiz ada, the island where, in the 1800s, tens of thousands of dogs were exiled to die. Offering a moving collage of testimonials to the inestimable value of non-human populations to the emotional and psychological health of the city, and a striking statement of witness both to advocacy and persecution across the centuries, Taskafa both portrays, and embodies the spirit of protest, and enduring solidarity with which it closes (mass demonstrations opposing the latest municipal proposals to clear the city of its street animals).


 

Director Statement:

We wanted to explore how public space becomes a battleground for the contested relationship between corporate making – through demolition and redevelopment of vast swathes of the city (an increasingly international process of erasure) – and the unfolding of everyday lives within this idea of what is commonly called ‘progress’, one embedded with promises of high tech security measures to keep us safe (inside gated housing complexes, shopping malls etc…).

What if, instead, we could hold onto a curious gaze, one that resists what comes – with its own pre-ordained rules and intentions – to a place? In such a location, this fixed looking would view a dishevelled street dog as abject, while our warmer attention might appreciate it as an emblem of love and endurance. To us in Europe, the fate of such animals is perhaps a reminder of the violence of modernity, where all that did not belong to its idea was banished from sight.

Taşkafa is not finally about dogs as such. It is about the way people seek, still and especially now, to belong to a larger context than themselves, one which respects other creatures and wishes them to play a significant role in their lives. The key issue is not whether we live securely, especially in its ‘official’ sense, but rather that we don’t lose touch with the shared reality that surrounds us.


 

Read more:

On Common Ground: The Making of Meaning in Film and Life, Open Democracy. The maker of new film essay Taskafa: Stories of the Street charts the journey that led her to write a ‘manifesto for co-existence in film and life.’

A review of Taskafa by Michael Pattison at MUBI Notebook

Notes from the LFF, a review of Taskafa by William Brown

Fugitive Images

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