An unsettling re-composition: Istanbul's lost Armenian April 11 Memorial

Abstract

This research uses 3D drawing techniques to create a re-composition of the lost April 11 Memorial, a contested monument which commemorated the deportation of Armenian intellectuals from Istanbul in 1915. We use the only photograph of the monument remaining in the public record as a witness to inform this re-composition and multiply the possibilities of remembering through the medium of drawing. The memorial's absence in the archive can be viewed as an extension of the violence Armenians endured during the deportations and subsequent massacres of the twentieth century, as well as a prolonged suppression of the Armenian people's right to memory within Turkey's unequal historical geography. For this reason, we represent the monument in a new way, in a new medium. Our research explores the value of non-physical reproductions of lost monuments. The re-composition takes place through making a visual and spatial analysis of the photograph, and reveals how drawing techniques, that use 3-dimensional projections, can be used to overcome the absence of knowledge. This method allows us to speculate on the lost monument, to reappropriate and carry it to the present by producing a new visual archive. This act also calls for the profanation, in Agamben's sense, of the memorial by unsettling and removing this forbidden object from the realm of the sacred and the inviolable. Through play and design, we open up a new use and space for the lost memorial.