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PHOTOFILE | REVIEW
DEFNE ORUÇ
ARCHIVING THE COMMONS
Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma
Book by Özge Çelikaslan, with contributions from Thomas Keenan and Pelin Tan
dpr-barcelona, 2024, 316 pages
ISBN 978-84-124942-8-0, (paperback)
Price £16.00
Re-inventions of the archive across contemporary art, media and global protest movements index a spiralling network of radical practices. Özge Çelikaslan’s Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma is a novel contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the affordances of audiovisual archives born out of social movements, readily diverging from previous studies that have tended to offer methodical yet isolated views on archiving the digital legacy of protests in the Global North. Çelikaslan’s long-term engagement with video activist collectives in Turkey allows her to adopt a reflexive methodology in analysing bak.ma, a digital media archive established following the 2013 Gezi Protests, with the broader intention ‘to reconfigure archives as a media activist practice, as commons’ (2024, 15). Alongside practice-based analyses of bak.ma’s (infra)structural qualities, Archiving the Commons considers how to reclaim and care for not only the image but also the history and relational principles of dissent. bak.ma’s scope continues to expand beyond Gezi and the national frame with contributions from diverse organisations and individual uploads, a case in point for Çelikaslan to make a nuanced distinction between community archives and ‘archives of the commons’ (73-78). It will be especially illuminating for digital humanities and visual culture scholars researching the recent wave of participatory collective archiving practices in the Middle East.
Restoring neglected and often censored images to public consciousness is one of bak.ma’s main objectives, as explicated in the book. Two historical records of the labour movement in Turkey, footage from the 1961 Saraçhane Rally digitised in collaboration with DİSK and a 16mm edited documentary film of the 1977 ‘Bloody May Day,’ serve as important reminders, if not ‘prosthetic memories’ (Landsberg 2004, 25-26) of the struggle for labour and human rights in the country. The Worker’s Party of Turkey (TİP) was founded in 1961 and the Saraçhane Rally served as a watershed moment where ‘approximately one hundred thousand workers’ and TİP affiliated trade unionists gathered in Istanbul’s centre, demanding ‘the right to strike and collectively bargain without constraints’ (Çelikaslan 2024, 194). In sharp contrast, the 1977 May Day gathering in Taksim Square ended in a massacre. The testimonial video uploaded to bak.ma registers the memory of the crowds and the chaos from the day notwithstanding decades of impunity. According to Çelikaslan, ‘archives of the commons undertake a “rescue mission” to reassemble the missing records of individuals and collectives. Many missing videotapes have been brought to light by bak.ma including those related to the Tekel [Workers] Resistance and Karahaber,’ the Ankara-based video activist collective whose archive was lost to the public when their website became inaccessible (2024, 191-192). In surveying these finds within bak.ma’s audiovisual collections, the author effectively narrates a counter-history of social mobilisations from the last six decades.
Player and timeline views of the video files illustrate Çelikaslan’s case studies. The latter comprise blurred scenes interjected with colour, distorted figures and close-up protest banners caught up in linear currents. As graphic representations of time-as-event, how the timelines abstract documentary imagery without emptying the archival material of its content is particularly evocative. They are a powerful visual motif in bak.ma, which has prompted the eponymous collective to carry it over to artworks made in collaboration with artist and bak.ma user Bilge Emir (260-261). Her cover image for the book takes after the timeline when reproducing the digital textures and distortions inherent in the archive, bleeding onto the front and back matter. While it is not analysed at length in the book, bak.ma’s creative experiments with the timeline certainly provoke further reflection from art theoretical perspectives.
Across four main chapters, ‘Commons as Archives,’ ‘The Emergence and Configuration of bak.ma,’ ‘Navigating the Archive’ and ‘Archival Vulnerabilities’ Çelikaslan performs an impressive balancing act between different scales of thought, as well as of theory and practice. Discussions of anti-capitalist underpinnings of commoning (45) and global archival paradigms (79) are carefully paired with more detailed accounts of bak.ma’s emergence (120) and content, tracing hyper-localised struggles such as the Tekel Workers Resistance in Ankara (147). Çelikaslan’s writing follows an academic format, including a chapter mostly devoted to reviewing literature. Yet, she does not shy away from first-person narration, and the subject of the ‘I’ shifts interestingly in the interviews with bak.ma contributors and users. This reflexive approach creates a degree of polyphony, as one strives for when commoning the archive. In chapter four, ‘Users as Commoners’ evaluate bak.ma’s creative potentials and limitations through their experience and interests. Their mode of relating to the archive and subsequent contribution to the book itself varies; some discuss the interface when searching for and uploading footage, while others point to bak.ma’s alternative uses, such as an online exhibition platform (166-170). Çelikaslan highlights that bak.ma’s users ‘encompass a diverse array of identities’: ‘artist, student, art student with activist archiving experience, archivist, aspiring archivist, political activist, queer activist, video activist, designer, filmmaker, videographer, and video activist-archivist’ (163). Lest we forget that these identities were once again primary targets in the mass political arrests leading up to and during the anti-government protests in March 2025.[1]
Then again, Çelikaslan is less concerned with issuing prescient warnings for today’s context. Rather she directs readers to past and ongoing resistance against state violence, nodding at historical continuities. She evaluates how activist archiving supports claims of rights and dignity in transitional justice processes in the Global South. This is another form the book takes the relational ‘archive of the commons’ as its model. By networking her writing with references to international community archives, audiovisual projects and local and international commoning practices, Çelikaslan creates an invaluable compendium of radical archives. As the first book-length study on bak.ma, there is a multitude of audiovisual content the author leaves out for readers–turned users and commoners–to explore firsthand in the archive. It is important to approach this limitation as an invitation: “Because the complicities of the reader are uncontrollable. The book crosses worlds and references, contaminates expectations, and opens up the opportunity to be read beyond predictable identities and self-complacency” (dpr-barcelona sampling the Smiths and Marina Garcés, 2024).
References
Çelikaslan, Özge, Thomas Keenan, and Pelin Tan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2024.
Deutsche Welle. “Turkey: Erdogan Calls Protests a ‘movement of Violence’ – DW – 03/24/2025.” dw.com, March 24, 2025. Accessed May 8, 2025. https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-erdogan-calls-protests-a-movement-of-violence/live-72017324.
Ertuğrul, Ege. “When Justice Fails: The Urgent Case of Esila Ayık under Erdogan’s Rule.” Medium, May 6, 2025. Accessed May 8, 2025. https://medium.com/@ch_commonfutures/when-justice-fails-the-urgent-case-of-esila-ay%C4%B1k-under-erdogans-rule-99d471db4498.
dpr-barcelona, sampling the Smiths and Marina Garcés, “Books are Louder Than Bombs,” June 2024, postcard.
Kaos GL - News Portal for LGBTI+. “KaosGL.Org Editor-in-Chief Yıldız Tar Arrested.” Kaos GL - LGBTİ+ Haber Portalı. Accessed May 8, 2025. https://kaosgl.org/en/single-news/kaosgl-org-editor-in-chief-yildiz-tar-arrested.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Notes
