ARCHIVING THE COMMONS

ARCHIVING THE COMMONS

Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma

Talk by Özge Çelikaslan

Q&A session moderated by Defne Oruç

This event draws on artist, activist and researcher Özge Çelikaslan’s eponymous book, published by dpr-barcelona in June 2024, which situates bak.ma, a growing decentralised media archive of contemporary social movements based on the open-source software platform pan.do/ra, in relation to counter-archiving and activist archiving practices. Bak.ma (meaning do not look in Turkish) is the result of a collaborative effort that began with Videoccupy during the Gezi Protests in 2013 to recuperate, record, edit, and share audiovisual traces of politically significant events. As Çelikaslan elaborates on the different stages of working with this archive, more radical functions of activist archiving or archives of the commons emerge, going beyond preservation. Rather than approaching the commons as a resource to be administered or extracted from, the creators and users of bak.ma operate under the practical and ethical concerns of archival care and responsibility towards the events and social actors that are rendered visible. The archive’s openness to collaboration and user engagement has also made bak.ma a radical space and resource in its own right, where civil organisations, community and activist groups can use the interface for their own archival collections and exhibition projects, such as with the Berlin-based student organisation Interflugs’ “Interflugs 30: feral methods” in 2021. Today, bak.ma has come to occupy an important place among other initiatives reimagining the archival space as inherently digital and dynamic, extending beyond European and North American contexts. What more can artists, activists, and commoners, as the book hails, learn from its dedication to visualising and transmitting alternative histories?

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Özge Çelikaslan (b. 1979) is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices. In 2014, she co-founded bak.ma digital media archive of social movements, where she remains an active member. She has been involved in numerous exhibitions and biennials worldwide, both personally and with the Artikisler video collective. Prior to publishing Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (2024), Çelikaslan co-edited the books Autonomous Archiving (2016) and Surplus of Istanbul (2014) with Alper Şen and Pelin Tan. She holds a BA and MA in Film Studies and earned her PhD from Braunschweig University of Art (HBK), Institute for Media Studies (2023).

Defne Oruç was born and raised in Istanbul, and relocated to London in 2018. She is at the early stages of pursuing an academic career, researching alternative frameworks for theorising contemporary art, feminism and photography in Visual Cultures. She holds an MA in History of Art from University College London with distinction and a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths, UoL.

This event was supported by the Association for Art History (AAH).