Occurrence 1: In Vain
March 7, 2025
Salt Beyoğlu

Annotations: Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu, Aslıhan Demirtaş

In a pandemic-era Zoom gathering, we find ourselves talking about talismanic shirts. Onur is preparing an exhibition preoccupied with the question, “Where are we in history?” I am drawn to the shirts as woven surfaces of text and mathematics that meet the body, though my proposal is still vague. Inevitably, I drift off and turn to mucilage, the subject of another project I have just begun working on. We move forward by wandering and digressing, a process we will later call wayfaring research, or knowledge production in motion. I speak at length about my wish to conclude this research on mucilage with a performance devised together with the “Sea Snotting Circle.” Onur listens patiently and then asks, “Do you know In Vain?” We move further and further away from the talismanic shirt as the figures of the Tethys Sea, Luigi Marsili, Âşık Mahzuni Şerif, and Onur all find their way into our conversation. Through narratives voiced by these figures, Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu set out to create a collective poetry anthology in the âşık tradition as a form of resistance in response to the mucilage outbreak in the Sea of Marmara in 2021.

We open “Sea Snotting or Nothing Less than Flamboyant in the Salty Waters of Istanbul” with Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu’s In Vain, premiered in 2022, and together we begin to write an anthology composed of poems, images, and words.