Wandering Around The Uptown

Branching Upside Down

yürüme is a sound installation that mimics a foreigner’s perception of surroundings as they navigate between languages. The work is an ode to a Turkish philosophy book, yürüme by Oruç Aruoba, where the protagonist is on a journey in three sections: yer (place), yön (direction), yol (way). Each section of the book focuses on different stages of self discovery, mainly questioning the effects of surroundings - be it a family, a street, a city, a country - on people. Each headphone follows a section and invites audiences to meet the protagonist as they experience familiarity and unfamiliarity with languages.

I considered the book as a landscape painting and replaced its protagonist (the self) with language. I imagined what growing up of a language might look and sound like, how a language would make sense of the world as they grow older, learn and unlearn from their environment. The installation is an audio-visual representation of these questions. It consists of a framed image that shows a screen-shot of the sound editing software and three headphones that play different parts of the soundscape.

https://betulaksu.com/yurume

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