Carrying the Nest: (Re)writing History Through Embodied Research

• Main Author: Nilüfer Ovalıoğlu Gros
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2019-11-01
• Series: Journal of Embodied Research
• Subjects: genocide; performance; pregnancy; exile; utterance; chant; embodying history; confronting history; meditation
• Online Access: https://jer.openlibhums.org/articles/23

This video article describes the embodied research conducted whilst creating the video performance 'Carrying her'; where various meditation techniques serve to confront the taboo history of the Armenian Genocide that reached its climax in 1915–16 in my homeland, Turkey. I instrumentalize my experience living in a two-century old stone house in the city of Mardin, in the Syrian frontier of Turkey, to reconsider the historical wound felt in the collective utterances of the region. Chants, lamentations, lullabies, testimonies, myths and tales guide me through the history embodied in Southeast Turkey and urge my journey to France where I re-discover the wound through sonorities of the Armenian Diaspora. My pregnancy opens a space to reflect upon women’s experience of the genocide, translating the corporal phenomenon of being pregnant to the reality of the exiled through the notion of carrying. The sonic universe reclaimed in the diaspora revives my memory of the land in its lullabies. To reclaim the diversity lost from my homeland, I create a soundscape that employs diverse sonorities of Southeast Anatolia. Complemented by the soundscape, the video performance composes my 'ağıt', my lament for the people exiled and massacred.