Bak.ma video archive collective will be resident at AGIT between summer and autumn 2023, where they will work on a series of collections, bulletins and public activations for the 10th anniversary of the Gezi Uprising. The project takes its name from Gezi's famous slogan "This is just the beginning, the struggle continues...", and under this banner, AGIT will become a space to reunite Bak.ma contributors, users, and allies.
Archives of social movements preserve and transmit ephemeral material and play a crucial role in shaping experiences of temporality and mapping visual memory. In addition to nurturing new collections and recreating analog and digital objects from archival content, "The struggle continues..." aims to reimagine the archive and physical space of AGIT as a resource for establishing connections between past and future movements.
Bio
bak.ma (means "don't look" in Turkish) digital media archive of social movements appeared following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as the Gezi Uprising. By collectivizing knowledge and memory and operating as a space of empowerment, bak.ma radicalizes the politics of the archive and indicates possibilities for creating a living memory of the social movements. bak.ma consists of voluminous video collections beginning from the 1960s until today covering political incidents and movements in Turkey's history. As a constantly growing archive with a participatory approach, the users generate the content by bringing the video activist footage in, which leads to turning it into a collaborative archive. Starting in 2018 users from other countries started uploading their video recordings, texts, photographs, and sound recordings of social movements. Embracing a large variety of archival material bak.ma creates multiple maps of late political history. The assemblage of video collections with hundreds of video documentation indicates people and groups, larger networks, places, events, and dates in these historical maps.
Activities
