Memory of Trees

Project summary:

"Memory of Trees" explores the memory of the Armenian deportations and massacres that occurred during the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.

Recognized as "genocide" today by more than a dozen countries, Turkey still vigorously rejects that claim. This ongoing project follows the remains and traces of an ambiguous, dark history - the definition of which is still being fought over nearly a century later.

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We knew where we were headed, as much as one can in the middle of nowhere. We'd driven an eternity of dusty, barren plains of Anatolia, looking for one particular town, Agacli, which in Turkish means “with trees”, or perhaps, the place of trees.

The village is a patch of green on the feet of brown hills where the Mulberry trees sway in the breeze, and men escape to the shade of the teahouse. (Ninety-five years ago, the scene might have been the same - only instead of Kurds, the villagers were Armenian.) Now, Agacli is a Kurdish town that a few years ago resurrected the past by reviving an Armenian scarf-weaving tradition that harvests silk with its Mulberry trees, and was all but wiped out in what I knew to be the 1915 massacres. However few in Turkey are permitted to officially say why the Armenians disappeared. The only surviving witnesses here are the Mulberry trees.

In the early 1900s, as the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating, a fiercely nationalistic "Young Turks" movement took power. With the Empire’s fall, the multi-cultural attitude that had made it one of the world’s great cosmopolis became eclipsed by the fledgling government's dream of a "pan-Turkic" country – a Turkish-speaking nation extending far beyond the Caspian Sea to the Siberian steppe. As with all ideologies, their taking hold and taking root means the termination of what doesn’t fit into the new identity. On April 24, 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress issued a deportation order to have hundreds of Armenian intellectuals rounded up, removed and murdered. The act set in motion the extermination of Turkey’s Armenian population.

Agacli has become a metaphor for my work: It represents the quiet truth about what happened here, a truth one can only perceive, and the landscapes of memories in the shadows of our imaginations.

These images are suggestions based on the little visual documentation that has survived; they pose questions, not answers; they search for metaphors where memorials should exist; they try to capture the essence of history’s restless ghosts and reconstruct what could have happened, since the physical evidence has long been destroyed.

When successive Turkish governments have physically destroyed evidence of Armenian existence, what clues are even left behind?

If there is no “evidence,” sometimes we must look to the absence of things for our answers. At the very least, we can search for answers from the trees, the grass, the earth.