DISTILLATION CONVERSATIONS_yasemin

How can plants become companions in exploring our connections across territory, language and (un)belonging?

DISTILLATION CONVERSATIONS is a series of performative conversations involving two human interlocutors - the artist and a guest - and a portable distilling device. The project delves into the relationship between olfaction and memory, focusing on a specific plant or flower chosen for its properties and cultural significance. Smell is used as a catalyst for exploring psychosomatic entanglements. The distillation process becomes the narrative centerpiece and transformative storytelling device, intertwining human and nonhuman participants - water, distiller, plants, performers and the audience.

The first of the collaborative series, DISTILLATION CONVERSATIONS_yasemin, is a lecture-performance developed in collaboration with visual artist Natis (Hasan Aksaygın).  Both artists, originally from the southern and northern parts of Cyprus, are currently based in Berlin. Grounded in the backbone of their friendship, the performance sets the table for an almost impossible conversation, in which the personal and the political become inevitably entangled.

The scent of jasmine links to the spheres of domesticity and nostalgia and resonates deeply within many local and emerging Cypriot communities. It guides their examination of the way (post)memories, experiences and perspectives of homeland intertwine, converge, separate and unite them. Like humans, jasmine arrived in Cyprus in and through migration waves. Thus, as a conversation companion, jasmine and its scent mediate a reterritorialization of the notion of ‘home’, where belonging is imagined as a continuum between the local, already-mixed Cypriot identity and our belonging to the planet.

Rather than a finished artwork, this lecture-performance is a work in progress, reflecting the dynamic, open-ended process of memory. It aims to generate new knowledge and elicit sensitivities that cultivate common grounds for resisting hegemonic narratives perpetuating divisions. Challenging fossilized cultures of remembrance and unilateral commemoration practices framing the „Cyprus conflict“, the project prompts to envision coexistence outside the nation-state framework.

What if, instead of selectively forgetting and remembering parts of our past that don‘t fit our imagined identities, we used our experiences to tell stories of hybridity, embracing the transformations and mutations that come with encounters between self and others?