Have just finished preparing the text for a paper I'll be presenting on Friday (conference info
here), in which I drew from a Doreen Massey essay I've always found good to think with. She writes that t
he identity of places “is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant.” Instructive, especially when we consider how Taksim has been forcibly emptied of people today––and what that enforced absence enables us to remember. The 1977 May Day demonstrations were some of the biggest Taksim had ever seen; when shots were fired, panic broke out; in the ensuing violence, 34 people lost their lives. This photo is drawn from several that Radikal linked to on their website, put together by Füsun Turcan Elmasoğlu, in which she layers photographs from 1977 and 2013. Not so much to remember as to not forget, or something close.
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