Şener Özmen

Reserve, 2015, vertical CNC lettering on brass plate, 120 x 40 x 30 cm

One I tried to sit

On one of the vacant seats of hope

But the word “reserved”

Was squatting there like a hyena

(I did not sit-down; no one sat down)

The seats of hope are always reserved.

Najwan Darwish

Nothing More to Lose

(Translated from Arabic: Kareem James Abu-Zeid, NYRB Poets, NY)

As the poet says, the word “reserved” was crouching like a hyena wherever death had occurred… It made me think that perhaps geography is more than destiny. I produced Reserved in 2015, drawing on what the Armenian cemeteries in Diyarbakır—upon which “official” or “civilian structures” had been built—recounted to my poetic spirit in a muted and sorrowful voice, through a history neither very different from nor distant from my own. Their stories reached me with the same timidity as that of a mother of two grown daughters whom I had met years earlier in Santiago de Chile, and who tearfully told me that she had come from Diyarbakır. I came to witness that these places had been reserved for new and possible losses. It seems there was always something worse than the worst. The only legacy left by the barbarian was massacre—nothing but massacre. Reserved, then, had to be heavier in weight, as a representation of power; ostentatious, as a summation of authority; immovable, fixed in place, and a genuine scourge that refuses to disappear from our lives. In this form, Reserved became a nightmare settled upon our chests: a malevolent dream that recklessly lays claim to whatever remains, declaring, “I committed terrible acts here that humanity will never forget, and this place belongs to me!”

An installation!? Most certainly!!