I was very saddened, though not exactly surprised, to hear through AN’s news about the destruction of Banu Cennetoğlu’s ‘The List’ in Liverpool last week.
Whatever happened to the work, and no one seems to know as yet, it seems clear that the force of appearance created by Cennetoğlu’s highly detailed act of naming (where she could) all the refugees who have died while seeking refuge in Europe since 1993 (34, 361 of them) along with the dreadful catalogue of information regarding each person’s age, reason for fleeing their respective countries, and manner of dying, was an appearance too much for some to deal with.
The work (both in its appearance on the hoardings in Liverpool and in its disappearance) resonates hugely with the approach and intentions of ‘N scale’, even though ‘N scale’ ‘names’ a very different group of people who have been ‘disappeared’ – the factory workers of Asia, China and elsewhere. But the willfull disregard, the sense of ‘collateral damage’ that allows for such deaths to continue to take place is the same. And so it is important, I feel, that these deaths are not allowed to remain mere statistics and become a kind of superfluous humanity (as Hannah Arendt would put it) that we ‘get used to’ and somehow, even if inadvertently and unintentionally, come to accept.
Giving specificity to these deaths by naming each person, is an important step to holding back the push to superfluousness, and in the context of memorialisation it is also a very recognisable way to give presence and duration to the dead. And in doing so to provide a space in which the living congregate and witness the presence of these absences.
But it also makes me ask a question, which I have been asking myself many many times since starting the ‘N scale’ project; what then? How does the act of naming become a force of political mobilisation. Or how are the living who read these names enabled (through or beyond such an experience) to act in such a way that these lists stop growing. Or is the naming enough, at least when it comes to what it is that art can do?
I don’t know the answer. But I am trying, through ‘N scale’ to at least pursue the question actively, and with others.
For now, naming is a first step, and an important one.
‘The List’ can be read through a link to it from Chisenhale Gallery website – https://chisenhale.org.uk/exhibition/banu-cennetoglu/
