New Perspectives

When the clouds speak is a series of nineteen images made of skies above specific places in Turkey. The sky of Ani or Diyarbakır, clouds over Adana or Yüksekova, are all the same, but all could speak of disappearance. The disappearance of cities, neighborhoods, and communities, of women and men, of places of memory and cultures. Disappearances that accumulate, piling up like archeological layers that mark mutilated memories through their absence, and their buried histories. Lhuisset developed this artistic approach to show that we should remember what happens and how this influences today’s events. For example how a recent peace demonstration in Ankara was interrupted by the bloodiest attack in Turkish history, ushering in a state of emergency. The skies of these nineteen sites in Turkey – all identical in their blue emptiness, dotted with white clouds – that Émeric Lhuisset offers us to contemplate, at the same time inform us about the morbid energy that fuels this vicious circle of extreme violence, which has lasted for far too long: does it not proceed from these successive disappearances, all denied and suppressed?

This text is an adaptation of Ahmet Insel’s writings as part of the publication Quand les nuages parleront (Editions Frocadero)