Pınar Öğrenci
Aşît (The Avalanche)
For her film Aşît (The Avalanche), made for the fifteenth edition of Documenta in Kassel in 2022, the artist returned to her father’s birthplace town, Müküs, an unspoilt spot in a mountainous region south of Van. On the Turkish-Iranian border, this former capital of Urartian civilisation and the Armenian Vaspuragan dynasty is now home to an urban population made up mainly of Kurdish communities.
Meaning avalanche and disaster in Kurdish, the word Aşît refers both to the climatic threat that sometimes disconnects this mountain village from the rest of the world and to ‘Meds Yeghern’ (The Great Disaster), the Armenian genocide of 1915, a tragic event that is still contested by the Turkish state.
Through oral histories, photographic archives and images captured in the region, filmmaker Pinar Öğrenci reveals the traces and traumas left by the Armenian people in the landscape, customs and memories. She recounts the daily survival strategies of the people of Müküs under pressure from the State and religion.
The film was also inspired by Stefan Zweig’s last short story, The Chess Player (1941) – a psychological thriller in which chess plays the role of a survival mechanism in the face of fascism.
Her interest in Müküs, she says, ‘is not only because it’s [her] father’s home town, but also because this village has been blessed by long years of self-imposed isolation; like a river that feeds itself, that remains unpolluted and clear… It’s an environment of non-conflict favoured by its geographical isolation, an oasis where unbridled capitalism and the state apparatus entered too late. In other words: a time machine, protected by the mountains. But this machine can also be seen as a kind of prison, the same one that Stefan Sweig talks about in his story’.
The filmmaker has chosen the songs of Hayrik Muradian, an Armenian musician who had to flee Van in 1918, to sublimate the impressive landscape of tranquillity that protects the village of Müküs.
THE ARTIST
Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives and works in Berlin.
Displacement, migration, survival, and resistance are cornerstones of Pınar Öğrenci’s films and installations. Driving her works are difficult, everyday struggles: the stories she hears, observes, experiences, collects, and documents from different geographies. In earlier works, Öğrenci followed the rarely-spoken stories of migrating communities around the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and in Berlin. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social, political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of forced migration.
Image : Pınar Öğrenci, Aşit (The Avalanche), 2022 (détail/capture), collection Frac Bretagne
© Pınar Öğrenci – Courtesy of the artist