An Example of a Diachronic Imagination from the Gezi Uprising

Abstract

Gezi Uprising was a wave of popular protests and horizontal mobilizations that emerged at the urban center of Istanbul against the destruction of a public park at the end of May 2013 and then quickly spread across the country. Gezi Uprising was marked by a revolutionary visual strategy of commoning images and repurposing them and this helped connect many protesting neighborhoods and locations, and their specific grievances. Along this synchronic imagination of the protest, the circulation of images also fostered a diachronic imagination that connected past struggles and experiences with the current ones, creating a sense of temporal connections of experiences of this newly imagined community. The photocollages of graphic designer and artist Füsun Turcan Elmasoğlu illustrates the mode through which the heightened diachronic imagination was fostered by the collective creativity during the uprising. Elmasoğlu created collages by bringing images that belong to the same place but 38 years apart; images from the large Labor Day demonstration at Taksim Square in 1977, “the Bloody May 1” together with current images of the square. Keywords: Gezi Park, protest, radical imagination, social movements, visual culture