Maya, 2020

 

Maya is an intervention at a former bakery in Kurtuluş (which used to be called Tatavla and was a Greek and Armenian neighborhood), it took part in Protocinema's exhibition A Few in Many Places.

​

The word "maya" in Turkish has meanings as "yeast", "essence", "substance" and in Sanskrit it means "illusion" or "the power of illusion".

 

I cultivated a yeast in my studio and then loaves of bread were made with it in the bakery and served to the public. During the fermentation process, the yeast is exposed to particular visual and sound tracks. The material used in the tracks are from traumatic social, political events (big and small, daily violence or historical events, pogroms, massacres, police violence) in the history of Turkey. I manipulated this visual and sonic material in order to make a translation that may correspond to the properties of the yeast and asked Zeynep Oktar to compose the sound accordingly. The work consists of a video that is showing the fermentation process and the making of the bread, and loaves of bread that the public was able to taste and buy.

 

Here you can reach to PROTOzine and read a short text on the work by Fawz Kabra