Unknown Perpetrators (!)

You are tracked down and registered while wandering down dark corridors, without knowing where they lead and which lost soul you might encounter. You want to participate in what goes on, to take possession of the pen that has written your dark fate, or, at the very least, you want to disappear like those other souls. But you are nothing but a spectator.

It is in vain that you try to break free of the manacles shackled to your legs by the government that observes every breath you take with their cameras, with their police, with their informers. It is in vain that you try to break free of the cells you are jailed in, of the cells you jail yourself, of your identities, of the hills you ascend to separate yourself from the hordes. They will follow you. The souls buried in tar-black sorrows are waiting for the touch of a compassionate hand, of the caressing murmur of sweet words. The consciences scabbed over with the burden of suffering, of forgetting, of not caring sink to the stone floor like lead weights while hopes glimmer faintly beyond the horizon.
The ´Unknown Perpetrators´ performance given by The Bare Feet Company on June 10 in garajistanbul (concept by Mihran Tomasyan) invited us to remember our lost people and to converse from our hearts with their pictures hung in emptiness.
Hanging from dark floating balloons were pictures of hundreds of people who had fallen victim to murders by ´unknown perpetrators´, who had lost their lives to terror, or had become targets of unchecked violence by the regime. It seemed as if they were waiting for us to release them to the sky so their souls could finally rest in peace.
So many were there that day... Uğur Kaymaz who died by 13 bullets at the age of 12, Metin Göktepe whom we were asked to believe died from falling off of a 1,5 meter wall, Ahmet Kaya who was exiled from the country and died away from his homeland because he declared he was going to sing in Kurdish, Ruhi Su who died because the authorities would not grant him a passport although he had to travel abroad for treatment, Hasan Ocak who disappeared in custody one day and was never heard from again, Hasret Gültekin who died in flames and smoke in Sivas, Güldünya Tören who was killed by her family´s decision after getting raped and pregnant by a relative, Sabahattin Ali who was killed by a MİT (National Investigation Agency) agent on the Bulgarian border as he was leaving the country... They were all there.
Others were also there, those whose faces seem familiar but whose names we don´t know, those who have a mother, a father, a sibling or a lover who continues to cry silently for them, in an apartment somewhere in the country to this day. As they grew around us with their hopeful and innocent faces, we were lost in thought, bent under the weight of all the losses: Look at all the people we have lost...

Translated by Deniz Akkuş
June 15, 2007