Ilayda Akarca – Inleyen Nağmeler

words by shona morgan

“I formed a cocoon from memories, a refuge from cold nights, as I find myself unsettled, distant from the lands I’ve grown up and formed my understanding of the world in”. 

While away from these lands, Ilayda Akarca forms a collection, a net of things to hold them - images, places, time spent with their partner and the echoed feeling of the sun on their shoulders. Inleyen Nağmeler is their resulting cocoon - a resting space away from the world, that also evokes notions of transformation. A protective shell of sensations and moments, bristling around them like so many sheets of paper, layers of memory.

Akarca began creating Inleyen Nağmeler, which translates to ‘Howling Memories’, during a difficult period in 2021 that made them question their place as an immigrant in the UK. Projecting fond memories onto the British landscape, they searched around Bristol, the place they’ve called home for the past four years - before that London, Montpellier, Istanbul - and further afield for moments of comfort and familiarity. They made a home in similarities, gestures and routines, by talking about life back in Turkey to friends who’ve never been and hearing the laughter of family over the phone. Familiar melodies, often sung by Turkish artists who share Akarca’s experience of migrating to a different country, were yet another way in which they tried to grasp something of home. The song Inleyen Nağmeler, while not being one of those, shares similar themes of nostalgia, and the idea of howling memories ties back to all of the other songs that accompanied Akarca during this time. Another working title was Gurbet, a word that can be used to describe a place where you’re living which is far away from home, the feeling of being a stranger and longing for your homeland.

There’s a sense when you’ve moved around a lot that a different you has stayed in each place you’ve lived, waiting to be inhabited when you return, as you speak the language, spend time with old friends and move in this different rhythm. Yet upon returning to these places that we hold close, we often find that they aren’t quite the same. People have moved, grown older, shops have appeared and disappeared: life has gone on. The image that we’ve formed while away doesn’t match up, may never have, and you no longer fit into the fabric of that place in the same way. 

“When I go back to the motherland, I am still displaced; what I remember, what I know and feel, is of the past; a past that is remembered through the fog of time and layers of emotion, meaning made with time, distance and longing”. 

There is an image in the sequence that stands out to me, of some hair in a frame: Akarca collected the hair they lost during the making of this work and made a frame for it, a visual signifier of who they were and who they are becoming. The desire not to lose themselves in assimilation, to hold onto parts of their sense of self while accepting this slow transformation that occurs each day. Hair is a cycle: you lose some, it grows, you lose some more, it grows.

Photographers often pursue memory, but the moments where the past feels at its closest are often the ones that happen by chance - when something slides into place, time becomes slippery and you’re pulled back. Such moments feel precious and bittersweet. For Akarca, they are tied up with heat, contrasted with the cold they’ve found here.

“Memories of home envelop me in warmth for a moment, shield me from the harsh wind and cold of where I am now”

“I imagine the summer, heat and sweat, before that moment slips away and the wind hugs me with cold arms”.

Akarca meant the second quote to be a photograph - in text it captures something different. A sensation that could be found in so many moments or images, a texture, a scent, a feeling on the skin. Reaching out for these moments, like something carried by the wind, a sheet briefly embraces you before flying away.

They searched for images around rivers and parks, around beaches and rocks; in their flat with their partner, connecting the body to the land. Many are close up, the camera pointing upwards, downwards, the eye moves from left to right, looking out at what home has become. The series opens on an image of one hand held in another - again warmth, comfort, grasped. The film has been pierced, adding to its tactility. Further on a hand pinches a flower, creases form a vase for it. Marks like this are both happy accidents, bringing new meaning and emotion, and reminders that an image is an image: you can’t escape into memory. They become layers of the cocoon, pages unfolding, shifting and rusting in the winds of time and moods. The image is itself a layered object: besides the moment of photographing there is the one of developing, piercing, scanning, printing. We remember, we forget, we’re pulled back and remember differently. The handmade book that this iteration of Inleyen Nağmeler sits within reflects this - the textured, softcover book is meant to change, to become marked with each viewing. The amount of pages and choice of paper - thin enough to allow for the phantom of each previous image to appear alongside the next - give it a sturdiness, preventing it from being an object you’re worried to touch and spend time with. Like our memories it feels both delicate and strong.

Alongside landscapes and images of people we find an old tire covered in barnacles, fruit decaying, plants sprouting, condensation, spiders, birds, branches on the ground on a sunny day. Due to my own ideas of home, memory and the past, for months I thought these were branches Akarca looked up towards at night, until I looked closer. To me the sun signifies another nostalgia, something of holidays and being away, long car rides through unfamiliar places. To Akarca it is home, that familiar embrace - in their more recent images of Istanbul there’s heat, freshness, energy. They’ve told me about how the light is different there, and indeed, even the sunniest ones taken in the UK don’t have that same feeling: the green tint that I recognise their images by feels like it is made for that light. Yet another way to help the photographs piled up around their desk, rolled up in tubes, cheaply printed for crits or placed within a book, to envelop them each day in some of that warmth.

All quotes are from Ilayda Akarca’s writing about Inleyen Nağmeler
ilaydaakarca.com